Asus STRIX Radeon R9 390X Review: Hawaii Gets 8GB
Metro: Last Light Redux Performance
Finally, we arrive at “The other Crysis,” another system slayer that really stresses video cards and pushes a system’s limits. Metro Last Light Redux is a revamped and updated version of Metro Last Light, which was your typical post-apocalyptic first person shooter game with a few rather unconventional twists. Unlike most FPS titles, there is no health meter to measure your level of ailment; rather, you’re left to deal with life, or lack thereof, more akin to the real world with blood spatter on your visor and your heart rate and respiration level as indicators.
Metro Last Light boasts some of the best 3D visuals on the PC platform and includes a DX11 rendering mode that makes use of advanced depth of field effects and character model tessellation for increased realism. This title also supports NVIDIA PhysX technology for impressive in-game physics effects.
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For this final test we set overall quality to High, turn SSAA off, select 4x Texture Filtering, and go with Normal Tessellation.
There’s the 390x competing just above its weight class again. Reasonable advantage over the 290x? Check. Outperforming the 980 at both 1440p and 4K? Check. It’s a shame about those minimum framerates, but it seems to be a trend among all the cards we tested, both AMD and Nvidia. (I have no explanation for the 290x displaying the best minimum framerate of the bunch at 1440p, other than to say I triple checked that benchmark and it remained consistent)
It’s prudent to chalk this up to 18 months of driver maturity and enhancements, as well that faster GDDR5 memory. AMD seems disadvantaged by GTA V regardless of what card is being tested, but across 3 other demanding games with eye candy cranked predominantly to High or Ultra, we see much more than a lazy rebadge here.
But let’s focus our attention back on power consumption and temps, because it’s not all praise with the Asus Strix 390x.
