Sapphire R9 380X 4GB Video Card Review [Video]

AMD R9 380X Specs & Sapphire Nitro R9 380X

Note: Our R9 380X comes from Sapphire, who've overclocked the GPU core clock to 1040MHz from the reference 970MHz. The memory clock is pre-overclocked to 1500MHz against the 1425MHz reference. There is only a 4GB model of the 380X; a 2GB version does not exist.

TDP of the R9 380X rests at 190W, equivalent to the reference TDP of the R9 380, though we'll benchmark total system power draw in the final words of this review. The memory interface operates on a 256-bit wide bus and at 5.7Gbps reference speed, outputting a memory bandwidth of 182.4GB/s. Overclocked cards will slightly increase these numbers.

TMUs are the main increase over the R9 380, aside from a generally higher clockrate from AIBs. The R9 380X is outfitted with 128 texutre mapping units (+16 over the 380's 112 TMUs), but ROPs remains the same – 32 for each.

The same 28nm fab process we've come to know is still used in the R9 380X.

AMD R300 Series Architecture

AMD's using the same architecture we've seen a few times now, so no big news here. The only point that's worth reviving, though, is AMD's commitment to DirectX 12 and new APIs, like OpenGL Next (“Vulkan”). This is something we discussed with Chris Roberts of Cloud Imperium games recently, for followers of Star Citizen.

In its 380X press materials, AMD brought tessellation and tiled resource management to the forefront of discussion. With DirectX 12's takeover imminent, GCN architecture has the potential to make a stronger showing by way of its Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACE), designed for asynchronous shaders in DirectX 12. Asynchronous shaders overhaul the pipeline in a way that splices sizable workloads into multiple smaller parts. These are then processed (asynchronously, as the name would suggest) to accelerate the pipeline, ensuring that no single resource is holding-up the processing of others. Larger resources can be worked on in the background while the small stuff gets managed throughout operation.

Support of Dx12's asynchronous processing isn't new to the 380X, but is a strength to which that AMD has aptly called attention.

As stated in the initial R300 series launch, some overall changes have been made to the architecture to push this line beyond “rebrand” and into “refresh” territory. Primarily, those changes are summed-up in the form of thermal envelope reduction and a slightly bolstered clockrate over the R200 series equivalents. This makes for reasonable gains in performance when cards are coupled with stable drivers – something we didn't have for the R9 390 at launch. We'll talk about AMD's driver status further down.

Sapphire R9 380X Cooler Design

Sapphire's R9 380X uses the company's “Nitro” cooler design, introduced as a “gamer-targeted” brand alongside the R300 series. In Sapphire's vision, Nitro cards hit market close to MSRP and appeal most to gamers who don't care to do much tweaking or overclocking, not to say the cards can't overclock – we'll test that later – but they aren't targeted at overclockers.

The Sapphire R9 380X uses four copper heatpipes routed through an aluminum finned sink, fairly standard, and is fitted with two ~90mm fans for dissipation. The two fans have a sort of “cheap plastic” feel to them, but the cooler overall is relatively high-quality. This is something we discussed in the R9 380/390 Nitro reviews.

Sapphire's mounted a backplate to their 380X – with the words right-side up, even – and uses a futuristic white/black/gray color scheme. We like the overall styling of the backplate, but it is generally not of this website's interest to discuss aesthetics; we'll leave the rest to you, told through photos in the post.

Test Methodology

We tested using both of our GPU test benches, as we are in the process of merging into a single GPU test bench. Both are detailed in the tables below. Our thanks to supporting hardware vendors for supplying some of the test components.

The latest AMD Catalyst drivers (15.11.1) were used for testing, except in the case of the Fury X and R9 380/390, which were all on loan and have not been updated since ~15.7. NVidia's 359.00 drivers were used for testing the latest games. Game settings were manually controlled for the DUT. All games were run at presets defined in their respective charts. We disable brand-supported technologies in games, like The Witcher 3's HairWorks and HBAO. GRID: Autosport saw custom settings with all lighting enabled. All other game settings are defined in respective game benchmarks, which we publish separately from GPU reviews. Our test courses, in the event manual testing is executed, are also uploaded within that content. This allows others to replicate our results by studying our bench courses.

Each game was tested for 30 seconds in an identical scenario, then repeated three times for parity.

Z97 bench:

X99 Bench:

Average FPS, 1% low, and 0.1% low times are measured. We do not measure maximum or minimum FPS results as we consider these numbers to be pure outliers. Instead, we take an average of the lowest 1% of results (1% low) to show real-world, noticeable dips; we then take an average of the lowest 0.1% of results for severe spikes. Anti-Aliasing was disabled in all tests except GRID: Autosport, which looks significantly better with its default 4xMSAA, and Black Ops III. HairWorks was disabled where prevalent. Manufacturer-specific technologies were used when present (CHS, PCSS).

• Battlefront test methodology can be found here.
• Black Ops III test methodology is here.
• The Witcher 3 test methodology is here.
• Fallout 4 test methodology is here.

The Assassin's Creed: Syndicate methodology will go live shortly after this post, but to recap, we tested these settings:

• 1080p / ultra high: MSAA2X + FXAA enabled. SSAO (not HBAO+) and “High” shadows configured to ensure fair benchmarks.
• 1080p / ultra custom: FXAA instead of MSAA. SSAO. “High” shadows.
• 1440p / ultra custom: as above.
• 4K / ultra custom: as above.

Overclocking was performed incrementally using MSI Afterburner. Parity of overclocks was checked using GPU-Z. Overclocks were applied and tested for five minutes at a time and, if the test passed, would be incremented to the next step. Once a failure was provoked or instability found -- either through flickering / artifacts or through a driver failure -- we stepped-down the OC and ran a 30-minute endurance test using 3DMark's FireStrike Extreme on loop (GFX test 2).

Thermals and power draw were both measured using our secondary test bench, which we reserve for this purpose. The bench uses the below components. Thermals are measured using AIDA64. We execute an in-house automated script to ensure identical start and end times for the test. 3DMark FireStrike Extreme is executed on loop for 25 minutes and logged. Parity is checked with GPU-Z.

Thermals, power, and overclocking were all conducted on the Z97 bench above.

Video Cards Tested

• MSI R9 390X Gaming 8GB ($430)
• Sapphire R9 390 ($340)
• Sapphire R9 380 ($220)
• PowerColor R9 290X 4GB (Deprecated)
• XFX R9 285 2GB ($206)
• AMD R9 270X 2GB Reference (Deprecated)
• ASUS R7 250X 1GB ($117)
• NVidia GTX 980 Ti 6GB Reference (& SLI) ($660)
• MSI GTX 980 4GB Gaming ($515)
• EVGA GTX 970 SSC 4GB ($315)
• EVGA GTX 960 SSC 4GB ($225)
• ASUS GTX 960 Strix 2GB ($200)
• ASUS GTX 950 Strix 2GB ($170)
• EVGA GTX 750 Ti 2GB ($125)
• GTX 770 (Deprecated)