A rebrand of a card no-one really wanted. Can a new name
change that?
Surely
you know what to expect by now? AMD gives a card a new naming convention,
everyone hopes it’s a brand new GPU and then everyone is disappointed because
it’s the same thing people have been buying all year. Just as the R9 280X is
essentially the HD 7970 GHz and the R9 270X is the HD 7870 GHz, so the R7 260X
is simply a very lightly tweaked HD 7790.
Apparently
I’m not allowed to just leave the rest of this page blank – leaving you to
doodle over the white space, designing your own Steam Machine and such – so
I’ll suck it down and plough through this stuff one more time.
The
GPU inside the R7 260 is practically the same Bonaire XT GPU that packed out
the rather uninspiring HD 7790. It’s got the same 896 core count and the same
number of ROPs and aggregate memory bus as well. What’s changed is a slightly
higher clockspeed in terms of both the actual
graphics processor and the attached video memory too, and, oh, I don’t know,
another X onto the codename of the GPU so it sounds more ‘Xtreme’.
AMD
gives a card a new naming convention, everyone hopes it’s a brand new GPU and
then everyone is disappointed because it’s the same thing people have been
buying all year.
If
you were hoping the extra 100MHz on the GPU and the up-clocked memory might
deliver a performance boost over the 2GB HD 7790, you’ll be disappointed.
Still, that version of the Bonaire XT is tough to track down, which makes the
R7 260X AMD’s top card at this price point.
This
isn’t really a bad thing: AMD is simply rebranding its GPU stack to make room
for its new Hawaii cards, so it’s practically a like-for-like switch – you’re
not getting any extra performance with the new naming convention, but you’re also not having to pay any extra for the ‘new’ card
either. I wonder how many times that word has been surrounded in quotation marks
across the myriad reviews of AMD’s latest range? Still, it’s a shame AMD isn’t
pushing the price down, getting the Bonaire XTX below $165.4 – it’s been
hovering around there since its release back in March.
That
version of the Bonaire XT is tough to track down, which makes the R7 260X AMD’s
top card at this price point.
Big
bad boost
The
problem for the R7 260X isn’t the rebranding fatigue some of us are
experiencing, robbing us of the customary excitement we glean from a new
graphics card release. Oh no, the big problem comes from the traditional Nvidia-based competition. In this segment, it’s the
excellent GTX 650 Ti Boost that’s causing the R7 260X to shed silicon tears of
frustration.
Right
now, you can pick up the Boost for $182 at Scan, and because it’s made from the
same building blocks as the GTX 660 – sans a few CUDA cores – it delivers
gaming performance well in advance of the R7 260X’s. Only the CoH 2 benchmark gives the AMD card any respite, with our
other gaming benchmarks the Boost card takes a sometimes considerable lead. At
this level, the benefits of Nvidia’s GeForce
Experience really come to the fore – AMD’s riposte isn’t anywhere near as
powerful just yet.
Only
the CoH 2 benchmark gives the AMD card any respite,
with our other gaming benchmarks the Boost card takes a sometimes considerable
lead.
The
R7 260X’s problems are nothing to do with the rebrand, so we’d be in the same
vessel if it had left it with the HD 7790 sticker. It simply doesn’t deliver
enough performance to hold its own in this segment, and that’s that.
|
Vital Statistics ·
Price: $182 ·
Manufacturer: AMD ·
GPU Bonaire: XTX ·
Clockspeed: 1,100MHz ·
Radeon cores: 896 ·
Memory: 2GB GDDR5 ·
Memory speed: 1,625MHz ·
Memory bus: 128-bit
|
