In-Game Benchmarks
So when we get into in game benchmarks we can finally see exactly how well the PowerColor PCS+ R9 380 will perform for you in game. For our testing I tested the card in 9 different games at 1440 and 8 at 1080p (Shadow at Mordor won’t let me force 1080p on our 1440p monitor). All of the games were set at their highest settings for all of the testing to get a worse case scenario. When breaking the card down by our three ratings (less than 30 FPS, Over 30 FPS, and Over 60FPS) for each game we can get an idea of if you can run the game at max settings out of the box and get the sweet spot frame rate (60 or above), if you might need to adjust the settings to hit the sweet spot but still playable (Above 30), or if the game is unplayable (under 30 FSP) we can get an idea of what to expect. Just like the MSI the PowerColor 380 ended up with 5/8 of the 1080p results in the playable but could use some setting tweaks and the other 3/8 were perfectly playable at max settings.
At 1440p I was expecting to see a little bit of an improvement in performance for the 4GB PowerColor but when looking at our rankings you can’t see it. The results were 3/3/3 with three games in each rating. When looking at the results I could still see an obvious increase in performance though so I averaged out the results to see the overall improvement. In the end (as you can see below) the PowerColor did have nearly a 2FPS improvement here. This is even better considering the MSI has a slightly higher boost clock speed. Is it worth? Well we will dig into that later when we talk about how much the cards cost.
Powercolor 380
1080p Average 63.48875
1440p Average 44.11777
MSI 380
1080p Average 64.16
1440p Average 42.671111