Gadgetory

midway through last year AMD and NVIDIA released their sub $200 graphics cards the Radeon r7 370 in the geforce gtx 950 both targeted the 150 to 160 dollar price range and at that price were able to deliver affordable 1080p gaming performance to the masses if you were to compare these two graphics cards on paper that Radeon r7 370 wins hands down the 370 has 33% more cores and twice the memory bus for a 70% more bandwidth the 370 texture fill raid and single precision processing power of the 370 is almost 30% greater as well so it seems like an open-and-shut case then that is until you realize that the r7 370 is built upon the ageing GC and 1.0 architecture while the gtx 950 s heart is in video's latest Maxwell architecture when we reviewed the 950 back in August it was found to be mostly faster than the r7 370 so that just goes to show how you can't compare one architecture to another on paper however since then mg is done what it does best slash prices and well we love them for that some r7 370 graphics cards have been reduced from the initial MSRP of 150 dollars down to 135 dollars while certain models can be had for as little as 110 dollars after rebates on newegg.com here in australia the cheapest 370 cost bang-on $200 yep we get rolled the gtx 950 debuted of 160 dollars and that's exactly how much it costs over at newegg.com today though certain models such as the MSI gaming 2g and the ACE 2 Strix cost 170 dollars down under the gtx 950 cost around 230 dollars so to recap the gtx 950 cost 19% more than the r7 370 in the US and 15 percent more in australia the testing will be including a to the very latest triple-a titles along with the tried-and-true battlefield 4 also along for the ride is Tom Clancy's Rainbow six siege which is you take seriously enough you're free to and visiting friends rather than not will also be testing with Just Cause 3 and explosive game looks so bad on console to make your eyes bleed we've got The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt the game with hair so real you GPU kind of in handle it call of duty black ops 5 no wait 6 whatever they're up to now we've got Batman Arkham Knight where finally I can drive the Batmobile around without dipping down to 5 FPS using a Titan X Mad Max a game I enjoyed a lot more than the 2015 movies all out for an open-world action role-playing game that can apparently be completed without having to commit post-apocalyptic murder and finally Star Wars Battlefront the blockbuster title which turned out to be shallower than a kiddie pool testing takes place exclusively at 1080p using a core i5 6600 K processor with the latest graphics card and system drivers under Windows 10 the games were tested using watered-down quality settings an effort to achieve a 60 FPS average and the settings will be labeled on the graphs the Radeon r7 370 and geforce gtx 950 were tested at the default AMD and NVIDIA clock specifications as well as a maximum overclock the maximum overclock was legitimately as far as we could push each card and we feel the results are pretty much the norm the GTX 950 was overclocked to a core speed of 12 60 megahertz placing the boost frequency at around 1400 and 80 megahertz with a memory speed of 8 gigahertz the r7 370 reached a core clock speed 1120 megahertz to keep in mind it doesn't support any kind of boost technology the 370 memory wound up to 6 point 4 gigahertz for almost all the games fraps was used to measure framerate performance and we recorded 90 seconds of gameplay in each game the only game where we didn't use fraps was Rainbow six siege as the inbuilt benchmark works nicely the gtx 950 enjoyed a considerable performance advantage over the r7 370 in battlefield 4 using the ultra quality settings a 1080p with MS a a disabled the 370 fell just short of 60 FPS while the 950 exceeded the 60 FPS barrier with 64 FPS maked 19% faster once overclocked the 370 did reach 62 FPS though it was still 18% slower than the overclocked 50 which delivered a very smooth 73 FPS the Batman Arkham Knight performance was far more competitive and although the game was tested with game when speech is disabled we were still impressed with a 50 FPS average from the r7 370 and a slightly faster 52 FPS from the gtx 950 overclocked the 950 average 59 FPS making it just 5% faster than the overclocked 370 and 13% faster than its standard configuration fall of duty black ops 3 played significantly better on the gtx 950 as it averaged 51 SS whereas the r7 370 was 18% slower with just 42 FPS even overclock the 370 couldn't match the stock 950 with an average of 48 fps once we have a clock the 950 it was able to reach an average of 60 FPS making it 25% faster than the overclocked 370 here again we find the gtx 950 as much faster than the r7 370 this time we're playing fallout 4 at 1080p using the medium quality settings along with FXAA the 950 was on average 17 percent faster with a smooth 62 FPS average frame rate once overclocked the 370 was able to match the stock 950 having received a 15% performance boost however overclocking the 950 also yielded a 15% performance boost making it 16 percent faster than the overclocked 370 even with the medium quality settings at 1080p we find that the r7 370 struggles with Just Cause 3 averaging just 4u yes the GTX 950 was 23% faster with 49 FPS on average there we are ideally looking for a 60 FPS average overclocking the 370 boosted performance by 15 percent to 46 FPS which still meant it was slower than the stock 9/15 on the other hand overclocking the 950 increase the average frame rate by 16% and we were now receiving a much more agreeable 57 fps the only game we were able to test with all the visual quality settings maxed out was Mad Max here the r7 370 average 49 FPS which was boosted 256 FPS once overclocked the gtx 950 on the other hand started a 57 FPS and once overclocked provided 16% more performance at 66 FPS the Radeon r7 370 was good for 53 FPS at 1080p using the very high quality settings remember succeed that said we needed to overclock the 370 in order to match the stock performance to the GTX 950 at 60fps overclocking the gtx 950 netted another 20% performance allowing the average frame rate to hit 72 FPS star wars battlefront were to treat on AMD hardware and as a result for the first time we see the r7 370 beating the gtx 950 obeah by just three FPS I mean 6 percent margin that said with both cards overclocked to their maximum stable frequency they provided the same 65 fps finally we have the Witcher 3 Wild Hunt and here the r7 370 was good for just 42 fps and 49 fps once overclocked which was just shy of the GTX 950 standard performance of 50 fps overclocking the 950 allowed for an 18% boost in performance as we hit a much smoother 59 fps power consumption is about what we expected when comparing GC and 1.0 to the more modern Maxwell architecture despite being considerably faster and almost all of the tests the GTX 950 consumed 10% less power in fallout 4 with both graphics cards overclocked that margin change to 12% in favor of the 950 the r7 370 and gtx 950 delivered similar performance in star wars battlefront that we find that the 370 consumed 18% more power and 22% more once overclocked of these two budget graphics cards the geforce gtx 950 s hands down the fastest we need almost all of our tests by a 10 to 15 percent margin making it on average 12% faster the only games where performance was comparable with Batman Arkham Knight and Star Wars Battlefront games where the GTX 950 had a distinct advantage that allowed it to reach a 60 FPS average once overclocked include a call of duty black ops 3 Just Cause 3 and The Witcher 3 in these games the 950 really did appear to be the vastly superior solution that would likely allow for even greater image quality settings to be used the 950 also consumes slightly less power as well which is nice but certainly not enough to hand at the whim when it came time to overclock we're able to push the core clock speed of the gtx 950 23% higher while the r7 370 had just 15% headroom this gave the 950 a slight advantage when taking over clocking into account and it was now an average 16% faster all of these stats really appear to be adding up an invidious favour and well depending on how you look at it they are however let's take a look at the cost per frame data here you see that bang for your buck the overclocked r7 370 delivers the best value and it costs to just two dollars 41 per frame though granted that is just 2 percent less than the overclocked gtx 950 also worth noting is that the 370 is 5% cheaper per frame before any overclocking takes place this then is a lot like our GTX 970 versus r9 390 comparison which to the dismay of many we went with the better overclocking more fuel efficient 970 the conclusion here is going to be much the same Oh be it for a slightly different situation if you can afford to spend the extra 25 to 30 dollars on the gtx 950 and we suggest you do is you get a graphics card capable of reaching or exceeding your 60 FPS average once overclocked that's with a rather impressive image quality setting is the latest triple-a titles even before any overclocking takes place the gtx 950 was good for 55 FPS on average well the 370 dip just below 50 FPS with the 49 FPS average obviously 160 dollars just out of your price range there's no better option than the r7 370 moreover if you can get one of those rebate cards from newegg.com for 110 dollars and that seems like the best option here in Australia the 950 just 10% more and giving it's at least 12% faster it's clearly the better option down under although this doesn't really change the finding is that is interesting to note that the r7 370 is essentially a three year old graphics card as it's a really bad Radeon HD 7850 with a much lower core clock speed back then the 7850 cost is 250 dollars so it doesn't feel like much progress has been made in recent times when you look at it that way overall both cards deliver a similar cost per frame so there's really no wrong choice in my opinion thanks for watching another Hardware emboss comparison if you have any questions at all in please hit us up at a forum AHA brown-box comm or in the comment section below don't forget to hit like hit subscribe and we'll see you next time