Sapphire R9 290X Vapor-X OC 4GB Video Card Review

Far Cry 3

Far Cry 3 is an open world first-person shooter video game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It is the sequel to 2008’s Far Cry 2. The game was released on December 4th, 2012 for North America. Far Cry 3 is set on a tropical island found somewhere at the intersection of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. After a vacation goes awry, player character Jason Brody has to save his kidnapped friends and escape from the islands and their unhinged inhabitants.

Far Cry 3 uses the Dunia Engine 2 game engine with Havok physics. The graphics are excellent and the game really pushes the limits of what one can expect from mainstream graphics cards. We set game title to 2x MSAA Anti-Aliasing and ultra quality settings.

Far Cry 3 appears to be like most of the other games we are using to test video cards and uses up about 20% of the processor and is running on multiple cores.

Benchmark Results: The Sapphire R9 290X Vapor-X OC averaged 26.16 FPS while the PowerColor PCS+ Radeon R9 290X averaged 24.14 FPS in FarCry 3. The two cards have a very similar framerate, but the 30MHz higher core clock speed and 60MHz higher memory clock speeds give the Sapphire card just enough horsepower to put it in the lead.

Benchmark Results: Some small variations here and there, but no big frame drops on any of the cards to report back about. The R9 290X Vapor-X was almost able to stay above 25FPS during our entire benchmark run.