AMD recently released the R9 285 with the 28nm Tonga Pro GPU, destined to serve as its mid-range enthusiast offering.  The Tonga GPU is brand new and is replacing the venerable but aging Tahiti GPU.  The 285 will pretty much take the standard 280’s place in the AMD GPU lineup.  The thinking for AMD with the creation of this card is to take the latest tech from the 290 series and meld it with the 280 series performance.  This isn’t really a refresh for the 280 series and is more of a step forward for it.  The naming may throw some for a loop though, since with the 285 one would think that it is further up the chain that the 280X, which is not the case.

The card that was provided by AMD to test the 285 out was a Sapphire 285 Dual-X OC.  The testing will cover the performance of the card and not the card as a package since this was not a retail boxed version.  In this review the 285 will be put through its paces and tested in a variety of tests.  It will be pitted against the reigning best single core AMD card, the MSI 290X Lightning to see how it fares.  The Overclocking will be looked into and checked to see how much headroom that these cards have.  For a card that MSRPs for $249 we will see if it is a good buy to get you good performance for your money.

AMD Radeon R9 285 Specifications

Tested GPU Specifications

Features

• AMD Stream Technology
• AMD Avivo HD (DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray Playback)
• AMD HD3D Technology
• AMD Eyefinity 2.0
• Enhanced Multi-GPU Capabilities
• Discrete Digital Multi-Point Audio
• SAPPHIRE Dual-X Cooling Technology
• UEFI BIOS support
• AMD TrueAudio Technology
• AMD Catalyst Control Center
• Dolby TrueHD and DTSHD Master Audio Support
• Anti-aliasing features
• AMD PowerTune Technology
• TriXX Utility
• Enhanced Unified Video Decoder 3 (UVD 3)
• Microsoft Office 2010
• Windows 7 support
• AMD App Acceleration
• AMD PowerPlay with ZeroCore Power Technology
• Accelerated Internet Applications Rendering
• Cutting-edge Quad HD display support (4K Support)
• Cutting-edge Quad HD display support (4K Support) [for Windows OS only]
• Dual BIOS ( Legacy and UEFI ) Support
• Windows 8.1 support

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Futuremark has always been on the cutting edge of graphics benchmarks and today represents a continuation of that leadership with their new 4K gaming benchmark. This new benchmark is a 4K version of their popular Fire Strike benchmark, which is the company’s most graphically intensive benchmark that is part of their 3DMark graphics benchmark suite to date. It goes by the name of Fire Strike Ultra, which is an update to the Fire Strike and Fire Strike Extreme tests that most users are used to. Fire Strike Ultra renders the original Fire Strike benchmark at a much higher 3840 x 2160 resolution, quadruple that of what the original benchmark was designed for (1920 x 1080).

Today’s Fire Strike Ultra announcement also indicates that Futuremark believes that the future of gaming benchmarks will need to include 4K benchmarking because of the increased prevalence of 4K displays for gaming. The benchmark itself will be included with an update to the 3DMark benchmark for anyone with a professional license, but if you have a basic version of 3DMark you are going to need to pay for an upgrade, which is a little disappointing. Fire Strike Ultra will also require that you have at least 3GB of VRAM on your graphics card as there’s a very high chance that it will run out of memory if you don’t. In many 4K games with higher graphical settings we have found that cards do in fact exceed 3GB of VRAM usage, which would explain Futuremark’s recommendation. Obviously you can still run a 2GB card, but it will very likely suffer horrendous frame (score) drops due to running out of VRAM.

Below are the differences between the Fire Strike, Fire Strike Extreme and Fire Strike Ultra settings in all three of the Fire Strike tests in the whole benchmark.

Fire Strike Graphics Test 1

Fire Strike Graphics Test 2

Fire Strike Combined Graphics and Physics Test

There is already a pretty sizable Fire Strike Ultra hall of fame leaderboard where you can see what hardware is getting the highest clocks with this less-than-day-old benchmark.

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