Synthetic Benchmarks

To start off my testing I ran the Gigabyte R9 280 through our synthetic benchmark suite. Going into 2015 I made a few big changes to our testing and in the synthetic tests I added the 3DMark Ultra benchmark that tests at 4k. The R9 280 isn’t exactly the card you are looking for to push that resolution but it should be interesting as more results come in to see how it compares. As for the other 3DMark results, the Gigabyte R9 280 with an updated driver outperformed the Sapphire R9 280 that I tested a while back by a little over 500 points in the standard “performance” benchmark. This bumped the R9 280 up over the GTX 770 and put it in under the R9 285 ITX card that we tested this fall. In the “Extreme” benchmark the GTX 770 pulled ahead slightly but there was still a noticeable improvement over the other R9 280 again due to driver improvements mostly. In Heaven Benchmark that favors the Nvidia cards slightly the R9 280 came in just below the overclocked GTX 760’s and had exactly the same average FPS as the other R9 280. It’s clear the driver improvements didn’t find any extra performance for Unreal based games.