PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 390X 8GB Video Card Review

Battlefield 4

Battlefield 4 is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) and published by Electronic Arts. It is a sequel to 2011’s Battlefield 3 and was released on October 29, 2013 in North America. Battlefield 4’s single-player Campaign takes place in 2020, six years after the events of its predecessor. Tensions between Russia and the United States have been running at a record high. On top of this, China is also on the brink of war, as Admiral Chang, the main antagonist, plans to overthrow China’s current government; and, if successful, the Russians will have full support from the Chinese, bringing China into a war with the United States.

This game title uses the Frostbite 3 game engine and looks great. We tested Battlefield 4 with the Ultra graphics quality preset as most discrete desktop graphics cards can easily play with this IQ setting at 1080P and we still want to be able to push the higher-end cards down the road. We used FRAPS to benchmark each card with these settings on the Shanghai level.

Battlefield 4 is more CPU intensive than any other game that we benchmark with as 25% of the CPU is used up during gameplay. You can see that six threads are being used and that the processor is running in Turbo mode at 3.96GHz more times than not.

Benchmark Results: In Battlefield 4 with Ultra settings at 3840×2160 we found the PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 390X 8GB video card coming in at 34.03 FPS, which is less than 1 FPS faster than NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4GB reference card! This is a big bump up in performance, so it is also likely that there were some driver improvements in the latest beta driver that also helped the 390X’s level of performance.

Benchmark Results: The frame rate over time chart shows that all of the cards are very similar, but are all performing in different ranges.