Sapphire R9 380 Nitro 4GB Review

Grand Theft Auto V is an action-adventure game played from either a first-person or third-person view. Players complete missions—linear scenarios with set objectives—to progress through the story.

Outside of missions, players can freely roam the open world. Composed of the San Andreas open countryside area and the fictional city of Los Santos, the world of Grand Theft Auto V is much larger in area than earlier entries in the series.

The world may be fully explored from the beginning of the game without restrictions, although story progress unlocks more gameplay content. (Wikipedia).

For 1920×1080 testing we set all of GTA V's primary settings to the Very High level (ambient occlusion was High). MSAA was turned off as it deals a harsh blow to the graphics cards' frame rates. We saw the game use over 3GB of VRAM on a 4GB graphics card, however squeezing the files into a 2GB frame buffer did not incur a noticeable performance penalty. At 2560×1440, the game's highest image quality settings are used (no AA) to correspond with our 1440P results database.

The built-in benchmark is used to gather performance data.

These results are particularly interesting. The GTX960 holds a slightly higher average frame rate than the R9 380 at 1080p although the Sapphire card maintains a higher minimum frame rate. This is directly related to the R9 380's 4GB frame buffer and the 2GB capacity for our comparison GTX960.

At 1440p the GTX960 is clearly struggling with the engine and its VRAM requirements – the average frame rate is close to the R9 380 Nitro, but the huge minimum frame rate differential would indicate bandwidth issues at the higher resolution.

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