When comparing AMD Radeon R9 390X vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080, the Slant community recommends NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 for most people. In the question“What are the best GPUs for gaming?” NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 is ranked 5th while AMD Radeon R9 390X is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 is:
In benchmarks, the GTX 1080 FE (Founder's Edition) is a hair slower than *two* GTX 980 units in SLI configuration (the difference is 2% in 3DMark 11). In gaming tests, the GTX 1080 FE achieved 61fps average in Need For Speed 2016 on high settings at 4K resolution. For comparison, the AMD Radeon R9 Fury scored 40fps (34% lower), and the GTX 980 scored 34fps (44% lower than the GTX 1080 FE). The only slowdowns you will encounter in maxed out 4K graphics is during extremely demanding scenes. The GTX 1080 FE also supports GPU Boost 3.0 which lets it ramp up performance even higher as long as the temperature doesn't rise too much.
Specs
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Pros
Pro High FPS in games
The R9 390X performs well in recent games. In Battlefield 4 for example, in 1080 and using ultra quality settings, the R9 390X achieves an average framerate of 130 frames per second, with a minimum measured at 72 FPS.
The card also performs well in Grand Theft Auto V (maxed out settings and 1080p), where it is able to achieve an average framerate of 97 frames per second, and a minimum of 45 fps.
In Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, the R9 390X is able to achieve an average 96 frames per second, with a minimum to 42.
For Tomb Raider (2013), the R9 390X scores 98 frames per second on average and a minimum of 74 frames per second, all under 1080p and maximum settings.
The R9 390X is also well-equipped with enough horsepower to handle 1440p gaming, where it scores an average of 111 FPS for Battlefield 4, 89 for GTA V, 72 frames per second for Shadow of Mordor and an average of 67 FPS for Tomb Raider.
Gaming in 4K resolution is also a possibility, albeit with lower graphical settings. The R9 390X can handle Battlefield 4 fluently on medium settings with an average FPS of 70, and 60 FPS in ultra settings with a minimum of 36 FPS. A maxed-out Grand Theft Auto V results in a minimum and average framerate of 24 and 69, and 35 and 64 FPS for Shadow of Mordor. Tomb Raider is very playable in 4K even with a high preset, with an average framerate of 76 fps and a minimum of 62.
Pro Supported by most high end games
Most games specifically optimize for this card (among others).
Pro Lower price point due to new GPU's
The Radeon R9 390X is an older graphics card and doesn't use AMD's new Polaris architecture such as the RX 480. As stores are trying to replace the previous generation GPU's with the new models, a lower price point is offered for the R9 390X. You can find a 390X graphics card for a little over 300 dollars, which is 100 dollars less than the recommended retail price.
Pro Epic 4K performance
In benchmarks, the GTX 1080 FE (Founder's Edition) is a hair slower than two GTX 980 units in SLI configuration (the difference is 2% in 3DMark 11).
In gaming tests, the GTX 1080 FE achieved 61fps average in Need For Speed 2016 on high settings at 4K resolution. For comparison, the AMD Radeon R9 Fury scored 40fps (34% lower), and the GTX 980 scored 34fps (44% lower than the GTX 1080 FE).
The only slowdowns you will encounter in maxed out 4K graphics is during extremely demanding scenes.
The GTX 1080 FE also supports GPU Boost 3.0 which lets it ramp up performance even higher as long as the temperature doesn't rise too much.
Pro Well optimized
NVIDIA properly optimized the GTX 1080 FE for DirectX. This means that games supporting DirectX 11 will see a slight performance boost, but more-so for the upcoming games using DirectX12.
Pro Very power efficient
While performance is higher than its competitors, the GTX 1080 FE actually uses less power. The maximum amount of power consumption this GPU requires is around 185 watts, which is an improvement of over 35% compared to NVIDIA's previous generation high-end graphics card, the GTX 980 Ti. This also plays a positive role when choosing a power supply, or determining if you need to upgrade your existing PSU.
Cons
Con Very little new tech
Mostly, this card is just a rebranded Radeon R9 290X, a card that was released in October 2013.
Con Uses a lot of power
The Radeon R9 390X consumes a lot of power - more-so than any other GPU (other than the 290X). In total, the testing rig used 440W of power when using the R9 390X. For comparison, the GTX 980 - which is also a previous-generation GPU - only used 280W, a 36% decrease.
Con Almost end-of-life, causes availability issues
Con No native support for 3- and 4-way SLI
SLI - short for Scalable Link Interface - is NVIDIA's technology of combining the power of two or more identical GPU's in order to reach a better performance. In other words, you can use multiple GTX 1080 video cards to further increase performance. Although the GTX 1080 supports 2-way SLI without a problem, NVIDIA does not offer support for 3- and 4-way SLI. The included SLI-bridge which serves as a connector between the two cards, is only compatible in a 2-way configuration. 3-way and 4-way SLI are possible but aren't supported. You'll have to use an older SLI-bridge found on older GeForce models and you'll need to generate an 'Enthusiast Key' on NVIDIA's website. However, NVIDIA does not guarantee a 3- or 4-way configuration will provide any noticeable benefits.
Con Disappointing performance improvements when using Vulkan
Vulkan is a graphical API that allows developers to communicate better with the GPU, which in theory should result in performance improvements compared to the more standard DirectX 12 or OpenGL API's. The GTX 1080 doesn't perform particularly better in Vulkan however, and the difference with the standard OpenGL is minimal at higher resolutions.
Doom is one of the first (and only) titles with support for Vulkan and serves as a good benchmark for OpenGL vs Vulkan performance. In 1080p Full HD resolution and Ultra settings, the GTX 1080 is able to reach an average framerate of 140 FPS in OpenGL. Vulkan improves the frame rate to 166 FPS, a fifteen percent increase. Starting from 1440p resolutions however, performance improvements using Vulkan are very minimal and not noticeable during gameplay. 1080 does pretty well at 109 FPS in 1440p, while Vulkan only marginally improves this result with 145 FPS, a 5% increase. For comparison: AMD's RX 480 card does perform significantly better with Vulkan and higher frame rates, with a performance boost of 29.3%. Similar results are seen when testing in 4K. In this case, the GTX 1080 using Vulkan actually performs worse than the standard OpenGL, with 59 FPS and 60 FPS respectively. AMD's RX 480 is better optimized, as it's able to achieve a performance increase of 24.7% in this scenario.
In short, Vulkan performance seems particularly useful when gaming in Full HD, but it doesn't provide much performance benefits otherwise. It would appear that NVIDIA's Pascal architecture isn't optimized for high-resolution Vulkan gaming.