AMD Radeon R9 270X & Sapphire TOXIC R9 270X Video Card Reviews

Battlefield 3

Battlefield 3 (BF3) is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE and published by Electronic Arts. The game was released in North America on October 25, 2011 and in Europe on October 28, 2011. It does not support versions of Windows prior to Windows Vista as the game only supports DirectX 10 and 11. It is a direct sequel to 2005’s Battlefield 2, and the eleventh installment in the Battlefield franchise. The game sold 5 million copies in its first week of release and the PC download is exclusive to EA’s Origin platform, through which PC users also authenticate when connecting to the game.

Battlefield 3 debuts the new Frostbite 2 engine. This updated Frostbite engine can realistically portray the destruction of buildings and scenery to a greater extent than previous versions. Unlike previous iterations, the new version can also support dense urban areas. Battlefield 3 uses a new type of character animation technology called ANT. ANT technology is used in EA Sports games, such as FIFA, but for Battlefield 3 is adapted to create a more realistic soldier, with the ability to transition into cover and turn the head before the body.

Benchmark Results: The AMD Radeon R9 270X was powerful enough to run Battlefield 3 at 1920×1080 at 60 FPS on average and even pushed our 30-inch monitor running 2560×1600 at an impressive 37FPS on average! It is pretty wild to see a $199 video card running BF3 so well at UHD resolutions. The Sapphire Toxic R9 270X was running at 65 FPS at 19×10 and 41 FPS at 25×16, so it just goes to show you that the extra 100MHz on the core and memory clock speeds really does help performance. The Sapphire Toxic R9 270X runs $239 and it was clipping the heels of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 reference card that runs $249.

It should be noted that the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti is discontinued, so you have the direct competition for the AMD R9 270X is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 at $179 and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 at $249. The AMD Radeon R9 270X makes short work of the factory overclocked EVGA GeForce GTX 660 SuperClocked video card that we have in our charts, but the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 proved to be a bit much.