To fully test the abilities of a given video card, we have used a blend of in-game benchmarks and custom recorded real world game benchmarking. For custom game play we have used FRAPS to record the minimum and average frame rates and to do so for a set period of time. All tests were run a minimum of four times and the scores are the average of all four runs.
All games were patched to their latest version. The OS was a fresh clean install of Windows 7 with all latest hotfixes, patches and updates applied. All games were tested at the two of the most popular resolutions of 1080P (1920×1080) and then again at 1440P (2560×1440). This means each game tested was run a minimum of 8 times: 4 @ 1080P and 4 @1440P. Before testing Unigine’s Valley benchmark was run for 15 minutes to ‘warm up’ the video card. This was done to ensure that long term performance and not short term performance is being illustrated.
The games used for testing were:
Sleeping Dogs
Metro: Last Light
BioShock Infinite
Crysis 3
Batman: Arkham Origins
Tomb Raider
Battliefield 4
Assassins Creed: Black Flag
Call of Duty: Ghosts
Witcher 3
For stress testing we used Unigine’s Valley benchmark.
For overclocking we used either the manufactures included software overclocking program or if necessary EVGA’s Precision X program.
Drivers:
GeForce 353.30
AMD Catalyst: 15.7
Main Test System
Processor: Intel i7 5930K
Memory: 32GB (4x8GB) Crucial Ballistic Elite
Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth X99
Cooling: Noctua U12S
SSD: 1x Intel 750 1.2TB NVMe SSD
Power Supply: Corsair AX860i
Monitor: Dell U2714H
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1
Synthetic Game Benchmarks
In the Synthetic Gaming Benchmarks section we will show a number of benchmark comparisons of the test card and other comparable GPUs, using various benchmarks which come included with five popular modern PC games. This will illustrate how much performance this card has to offer. To ensure that long term performance is and not short term performance is illustrated 15 minutes of Unigine’s Valley benchmark was run to ‘warm up’ the video card. Only then were any tests run on the now warm video card.
Real World In-Game Benchmarks
In the Real Gaming Benchmarks section we will show a number of timed real world game play results using FRAPS and five popular modern PC games. This will illustrate how much performance the card being tested has to offer, and do so in a way which cannot be unduly skewed by driver ‘optimizations’ which have been included for the sole purpose of improving benchmark results. While not as common as it once was such optimizing is still not unheard of by either AMD or NVIDIA. Once again Unigine’s Valley benchmark was run for 15 minutes to ‘warm up’ the video card prior to testing.
MSI R9 390X Gaming 8G – Sleeping Dogs (SGB)
Sleeping Dogs is an open world action-adventure video game developed by United Front Games in conjunction with Square Enix London Studios and published by Square Enix, released on August 2012. Sleeping Dogs has a benchmark component to it that mimics game play and an average of four runs was taken.
The settings used in the testing below are the Extreme display settings and a resolution of 2560×1440 and 1920×1080. World density is set to extreme, Vsync disabled, high-res textures are enabled, and shadow resolution, shadow filtering, screen space ambient occlusion, and quality motion blur are all set to high.
In Sleeping Dogs we saw basically a 5% improvement in performance over what a stock R9 390X could do. That’s basically one dollar for every percent of improvement. That is darn impressive.
