- Date:
- Monday , March 10, 2014
- Author:
- Grady McKinney
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Share:

AMD Radeon R9 270X and R9 270 Video Card Review
We take a look at AMD's mid-range R9 270X and R9 270 with an MSI R9 270X GAMING and SAPPHIRE R9 270 Dual-X. We will make comparisons to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 760 using a retail card which is within this range of AMD's GPUs. We will overclock all three video cards and put these head-to-head for the ultimate mid-range performance comparison.
Battlefield 4
Our full-evaluation of Battlefield 4 has been published. Please give this a read to understand how all the graphics settings work and what they mean.
In Battlefield 4, we selected the Siege of Shanghai as our map for testing.Siege of Shanghai is presented as a large conquest map with up to 64 players able to be connected at one time. The map provides a good representation of all of the eye candy that can be found throughout the game, including devolution of the sky scraper, water effects, tight city streets, and of course plenty of tanks. For our testing procedures, we searched for a server with at least 60 players in a match and where the ping was under 50ms for a server.
We then played within the server performing various tasks, including capturing flags, blowing up tanks, and causing general mayhem as part of the team that we were placed on. We recorded the frame rates via FRAPS for five minutes for presentation below, even though we spent significantly more time playing at each graphical setting. Keep in mind that because this is a multiplayer map where the actions of the other 63 players can be unpredictable, it is very difficult to look at a single FPS graph and discern the gameplay experience in the multiplayer environment. Performance or is determined through more time spent playing with the cards than represented on the graph.
Highest Playable Settings

*NOTE* - We had issues with the 270X and 270 in Battlefield 4, documented here, running in AMD's Mantle. Therefore, we ran all three cards in traditional Direct3D 11 mode and used FRAPs to do our usual testing.
In Battlefield 4 we discovered our video card lineup was ill-suited for gameplay at 2560x1600. The MSI R9 270X GAMING 2G and ASUS GeForce GTX 760 DC II OC both playable at 1920x1080 while running 2X MSAA and "Ultra" settings. The ASUS GeForce GTX 760 DC II OC averaged 60.6 FPS, and the MSI R9 270X GAMING 2G was slightly faster averaging 61.1 FPS.
When it comes down to distinguishing which of these two video cards provided the better gameplay, it's too close to call. Each performed about equally, with no real performance advantage compared to the other.
The SAPPHIRE R9 270 Dual-X was not as quick as the ASUS GeForce GTX 760 DC II OC or MSI R9 270X GAMING 2G at common settings, and in-fact was not considered playable. To adjust for the necessary performance, we simply had to turn off MSAA, and enable "Low" FXAA. This allows for some form of AA with minimal texture blurring, at a low performance cost.
Apples-to-Apples
In this apples-to-apples test we have Battlefield 4 set to run at 2560x1600 with FXAA Low enabled. We are using "Ultra" settings including HBAO.
Here we tried to push our video cards to 2560x1600, however we see how much strain this puts on our lineup. The ASUS GeForce GTX 760 DC II OC was the fastest performer averaging 44.8 FPS. That is 4.7% faster than the MSI R9 270X GAMING 2G at 42.8 FPS, and 28.4% faster than the SAPPHIRE R9 270 Dual-X. The MSI R9 270X GAMING 2G is also 22.6% faster than the SAPPHIRE R9 270 Dual-X.


