Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unbox today we're revisiting the Radeon r9 380 because a lot of you have requested me to revisit the Radeon r9 380 because I took a look at the gtx 960 quite recently and didn't include the 380 there because we were looking at how the 960 whether the gtx 1660 is a good upgrade option for those with 960s and that the 380 didn't really fit into that comparison anyway I thought since we have looked at the 960 we might as well compare the 960 and 380 head-to-head to satisfy those of you who wanted to see that comparison happen now both of these GPUs were released in 2015 and they both retailed for $200 u.s. they were mid-range products though at the time they were more what you would consider to be sort of lower mid-range budget mid-range anyway in my day 1 review which was published over on textbook because I wasn't making videos four years ago I found both GPUs delivered a similar level of performance so I said the following peaking between the r9 380 and gtx 960 will come down to personal preference and again the nvidia card has an edge in power consumption cooling and overclocking the reason the gtx 960 was a more power efficient product was largely down to the fact that it was almost 40% smaller and both did use a 28 nanometer process though AMD used globalfoundries while Nvidia used TSMC however it wasn't too long before AMD got their drivers sorted out and the r9 380 started to pull ahead of the gtx 960 now four years later i've decided to see how they compare and i'll be comparing them to modern GPUs such as the gtx 1660 and half a dozen other models this testing was initially intended to be used as an upgrade guide so I'm not using dialed down quality settings to try and find the 60fps sweet spot with these old GPUs and I'm also not retesting with the gtx 1050 or rx 560 for example as they are upgrade options further of these GPUs rather the intention here was to show you how much faster products such as the gtx 1616 RX 590 are when all things are equal after all if low-quality presets are your jam then the r9 380 or gtx 960 will still vice but if you want to enjoy modern games and all of their glory well knowing how these GPUs perform using higher quality settings really is a must anyway hope that explains why I'm using high to ultra quality presets at 30 P okay so let's talk testing for this one I'll be closely looking at performance at 1080p and about a dozen titles and then we'll jump to a 33 game breakdown comparing the r9 380 and gtx 960 head-to-head along with an r9 380 comparison with the gtx 1660 then finally the test system includes a kora 999 okay clocked at 5 gigahertz with 32 gigabytes of ddr4 3,200 memory ok let's get into the results first up we have apex legends and right away we see the r9 380 is a good bit ahead of the gtx 960 hitting 51 fps an average opposed to just 45 FPS this 13% boost was very noticeable and in fact it's probably more than 15% increase in 1% low performance that you'll really notice those of you keen on this title something like the RX 570 will provide almost a 50% boost in framerate or for more than double the performance the gtx 1660 will work nicely well ok the performance uplift seen in the division 2 is rather massive here there huh 9 380 was 44% faster than the GTX 960 this isn't a particularly good title for NVIDIA GPUs at least Pascal and older and here we see the 380 was even 15% faster than the 3 gigabyte gtx 1060 that said with just 39 FPS on average you'll want to dial down the quality settings for playable formants alternatively something like the RX 570 will produce over 45% more frames moving on we have shut out of the Tomb Raider and we find yet another title where the r9 380 is again debating the gtx 960 by a comfortable margin this time was 18% faster with 40 FPS on average and was even playable at 1080p there again if you want to use something like the r9 380 reducing the quality preset will enable a smoother gaming experience alternatively you could upgrade to a gtx 1660 for a 90 percent boost in performance we see another shellacking and Forza horizon for here the r9 380 decimated the gtx 960 by a whopping 31 percent margin perhaps more surprisingly the 380 offered highly playable performance at 1080p with the ultra quality preset very impressive stuff that this place the 380 roughly on path of GTX 970 so again a very impressive result next up we have hitman 2 and here the iodine 3d was 8% fast on the GTX 960 the game was also quite playable using the ultra quality says it's an EP but for a 120 percent performance uplift the GTX 1660 works rather well the online 3d also does reasonably well and just calls for I mean it's not the world's most optimized title and yet we're still seeing playable frame rates at te p if only just the gtx 960 on the other hand wasn't really playable the 3d was just 6% faster for the average frame rate but 20% faster for the 1% low and this made a significant difference the gaming experience moving on we have Resident Evil 2 and here we have another solid win for the r9 380 and here we see a 15% framerate increase over the GTX 960 again the game was playable using the maximum quality preset but ideally you will want to dial back the quality settings or upgrade to something like a gtx 1660 or RX 590 even in fortnight the nvidia loving in battle rail the r9 380 still managed to edge out the gtx 960 at this point you kind of have to ask the question can the plucky little maxwell GPU get a win in anything not sure about that one will have to look a bit later on the video but here was a whisker slower though overall i would call this one a tie performance was really close in metro exodus here the r9 thready was just 3 FPS faster though at these low frame rates that did equate to an 11% performance increased still for this one you will absolutely need to wind down the quality settings or upgrade to something like a gtx 1660 which offered a nice 90 percent performance boost no surprises here the Pascal and older architectures gets smoked in Rainbow six siege here the r9 380 was 25% faster hitting 60 FPS on average and providing a noticeably better experience we see another display of pure domination for the r9 380 in battlefield 5 heroes 21% faster than the gtx 960 the game was also very playable as well and with a few minor tweeks could easily average over 60fps in our test performance in World of Tanks was pretty even this is an older game that's continually updated but as is the case with fortnight NVIDIA has a bit of input here still the r9 380 managed to edge out the GTX 960 by a few frames so overall a decent enough result finally we have far cry new dawn and here the r9 380 was 9% faster on average but did deliver a smoother and more consistent experience thanks to a 19 percent improvement in 1% Loeb hormons okay so we're looking at total system consumption here and the r9 380 is somewhat let off the hook because we're using a high-end rig for testing here the total system consumption was increased by just 12% we comparing the r9 threading gtx 960 in a lower spec rig that figure would likely grow to over 20% still even in this example we're peeking it well under 300 watts so it's not like you need a massive power supply to handle the r9 380 you okay well that appeared to be pretty one-sided in the 13 games that we just looked at but I have of course tested 33 games so let's swiftly move on and see if the gtx 960 was able to win in any of them well it did win in total war Warhammer 2 1 out of 33 isn't bad is it and we also saw in Thai in f1 2018 performance was also close in project cars to Wolfenstein 2 warframe World of Tanks fortnight quake champions and Ghost Recon wildlands for the most part though the r9 380 was faster by a 10% margin or greater and this is reflected by the 33 game average which saw the 380 delivering 14% more performance the performance uplift seen in strange Brigade and the division 2 was massive while we also saw big wins in Sniper Elite 4 and Forza horizon 4 overall a solid win for the r9 3 it's certainly proven to be the better investment after all these years to be honest the findings won't be terribly surprising to any of you who have been following the progress of these two GPUs over the years you'll be quite well aware that the r9 380 has been getting the better of the GTX 960 I myself often test these two GPUs and new triple-a titles we've seen time and time again that the 380 is a good bit faster than the GTX 960 for those of you who are still rocking an r9 380 and are looking for an upgrade now something like a cheap rx 570 that'll work quite well alternatively if you are looking at spending around $200 then I strongly suggest the gtx 1660 the gtx 1660 was 87% faster on average and bara few tiles offered at least a 50% performance uplift moreover we saw gains of around a hundred percent or better and a dozen of the titles tested so the 1660 is certainly a worthy upgrade if you've been holding out all this time for now though that is going to do it for this one if you did enjoy the video be sure to hit the like button you can subscribe for more content if you haven't already and you enjoyed this video and you thought I want to see more of that then you can you can hit the subscribe thing and if you eat the belt it'll notify you and then you are in the running to type first when the video comes online that's always seems like it's a lot of fun people yeah a so you know really enjoy that and if you really enjoy what we do you can also support us on patreon there's some pretty cool perks if you jump over the link you can see those anyway thank you for watching I'm your host Steve I will see you again next time at least I hope to especially if you subscribe and hit the alarm bell see you next time