PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 390X 8GB Video Card Review

Batman: Arkham Origins

Batman: Arkham Origins is an action-adventure video game developed by Warner Bros. Games Montral. Based on the DC Comics superhero Batman, it follows the 2011 video game Batman: Arkham City and is the third main installment in the Batman: Arkham series. It was released worldwide on October 25, 2013.

For testing we used DirectX11 Enhanced, FXAA High Anti-Aliasing and with all the bells and whistles turned on. It should be noted that V-Sync was turned off and that NVIDIA’s PhysX software engine was also disabled to ensure both the AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards were rendering the same objects. We manually ran FRAPS on the single player game instead of using the built-in benchmark to be as real world as we possibly could. We ran FRAPS in the Bat Cave, which was one of the only locations that we could easily run FRAPS for a couple minutes and get it somewhat repeatable.

The CPU usage for Batman: Arkham Origins was surprising low with just 10% of the Intel Core i7-4960X being used by this particular game title. You can see that the bulk of the work is being done by one CPU core.

Benchmark Results: The PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 390X had an average of 50.54 FPS on Batman Arkham Origins, which is about 8.4% faster than the AMD Radeon R9 290X reference card. The PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 390X was slower than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 reference card as it scored 52.91 FPS.

Benchmark Results: When you look at performance over time it should be a shock to anyone to see the Radeon R9 390X mirroring the Radeon R9 290X, but at just a slightly higher level of performance. The larger 8GB frame buffer might come in handy on some 4K multi-monitor setups, but on our single-monitor setup we never saw it make a difference in the half a dozen games that we tested.