XFX Radeon R9 390 Black Edition OC 8GB Video Card Review

By Nathan Kirsch January 21, 2016

Fallout 4

Fallout 4 is an open world action role-playing video game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. Fallout 4 is set in a post-apocalyptic Boston in the year 2287, 210 years after a devastating nuclear war, in which the player character emerges from an underground bunker known as a Vault. Gameplay is similar to Fallout 3. The title is the fifth major installment in the Fallout series and was released worldwide on November 10th, 2015.

Fallout 4 was benchmarked with ultra image quality settings with TAA and 16x AF. These settings are tough for entry level discrete graphics cards, but are more than playable on high-end gaming graphics cards. V-Sync can’t be disabled in the games options, so we edited the necessary INI files and disabled vsync in the driver software as well. We used FRAPS to benchmark Fallout 4 after you emerge from the vault and are in The Commonwealth.

Benchmark Results: In Fallout 4 at 2560×1440 the XFX Radeon R9 390 was 2 FPS faster than the GeForce GTX 970 on the min and max, but was less than 1 FPS faster than the overall average. The average Frame Rate was above the magical 60 FPS mark, but it still dipped down into the low 40’s. Those will an AMD FreeSync monitor will be able to get an enjoyable gaming experience with this card at 2560×1440 as the frame rate of the card will go along with the Hz range of most FreeSync displays.

Benchmark Results: When we increased the resolution to 3840×2160 for some 4K gaming goodness the performance gap widened between the R9 390 and GTX 970.