PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 390X 8GB Video Card Review

Crysis 3

Like the others, it is a first-person shooter developed by Crytek, using their CryEngine 3. Released in February 2013, it is well known to make even powerful system choke. It has probably the highest graphics requirements of any game available today. Unfortunately, Crytek didnt include a standardized benchmark with Crysis 3. While the enemies will move about on their own, we will attempt to keep the same testing process for each test.

Crysis 3 has a reputation for being highly resource intensive. Most graphics cards will have problems running Crysis 3 at maximum settings, so we settled on no AA with the graphics quality mostly set to Very High with 16x AF. We disabled v-sync and left the motion blur amount on medium.

Crysis 3 appeared to run for the most part on just 3 CPU threads and used up about 15-18% of our Intel Core i7-4960X processor with these settings. Notice that the processor speed was at 3.53GHz and we very seldom, if ever, saw the processor go into turbo mode on Crysis 3.

Benchmark Results: On Crysis 3 at 3840×2160 the PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 390X graphics card averaged 22.99 FPS again beating out the GeForce GTX 980 that averaged 22.23 FPS.

Benchmark Results: Crysis 3 uses right around 4GB of frame buffer, so it might be seeing the extra memory kicking in here in this benchmark. We looked at GPU-Z and saw more than 4GB of memory being used by the GPU in Crysis 3 and Far Cry 4, so that might be part of the reason we see a nice performance jump.