AMD R9 290X beats the GTX 980 Ti in DX12
Who am I kidding, right? For a past-gen Hawaii XT based AMD R9 290X to match a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti is already ridiculous enough, but beat? Apparently, it does. In Ashes of Singularity’s benchmark, which is the first game to be based on DirectX 12, shows that for the 99th percentile frames per second benchmark — the minimum frame rate you can expect to see 99 percent of the time — the R9 290X actually beats the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti.
A higher minimum FPS generally means a more playable experience. It is surprising to see AMD’s past-gen flagship actually beat NVIDIA’s second fastest single GPU card. AMD does lose to the GTX 980 Ti in the average FPS tests, but it still nips at the 980 Ti’s heels, which is an achievement on its own given the age of the 290X compared to the GTX 980 Ti.
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Of course, we have seen the jump in draw calls that AMD’s GPUs can consume in DX12 compared to DX11, but I never expected an improvement of this sort. And what’s even more intriguing is that NVIDIA’s performance falls when using DX12 instead of DX11. This points to NVIDIA’s optimization issues more than a lack of raw power.
SOURCE: ArsTechnica
Pokdepinion: This is very good news for users of older AMD cards. They may have just found the reason not to upgrade and save up until the next generation Artic Islands or Pascal hits the market.
