AMD Radeon R9 390X vs AMD Radeon R9 380

AMD Radeon R9 390X

The AMD Radeon R9 390X is a high end desktop graphics card that was announced in summer 2015. It is based on the same chip (Hawaii, now called Grenada) as the predecessor the Radeon R9 290X with slightly increased clock rates. AMD specifies the R9 390X with a core clock of 1050 MHz and memory clock rate of 6000 MHz (effective) for the GDDR5. However, most third party vendors are using slightly higher clock rates. 

The chip is based on the second generation of the GCN architecture (also called GCN 1.1) and supports DirectX 12 with Feature Level 12_0. It offers 2816 shaders, 176 TMUs, 64 ROPs and a 512 Bit GDDR5 memory system.

The similar named AMD Radeon R9 M390X for laptops is a lot slower as its based on the smaller Tonga chip with 2048 shaders and slower clock rates.

The performance is depending on the game but on average it is similar to a desktop GeForce GTX 980 (or notebook version, that is similar). Compared to the older R9 290X it is only minimally faster due to the slightly increased clock rates.

With a TDP of 275 Watt, the R9 390X is a relatively power hungry card and cant compete with the efficiency of the Nvidia counterpart.

AMD Radeon R9 380

The AMD Radeon R9 380 is a desktop graphics card of the performance class that was introduced in mid 2015. It is based on the 28 nm Tonga GPU with 1792 activated shaders (of the 2048) and a 256 Bit GDDR5 memory interface (5700 MHz effective resulting in 182.4 GB/s). The card integrates 112 TMUs and 28 ROPs and supports DirectX 12 (Feature Level 12_0).

The R9 380 competes with the desktop GeForce GTX 960 and in our benchmark tests it was able to pull slightly ahead on average but stay behind the older Radeon R9 280X. Therefore, demanding games of 2015 should be playable in maximum detail settings and full HD resolution. See below for a list of tested games.

The power consumption is rated at 190 Watt (TDP) and is on average clearly higher than the GTX 960. Compared to the only slightly faster 280X however, the 280 is very efficient.