Can a £100 PC graphics card match next-gen console?

Released just a month before the Xbox One and PS4 hit UK retail, the Radeon R7 260X is a value-focused graphics card that brings stiff competition to both next-gen platforms. In essence, we're promised a card that can deliver true, next-gen calibre results at under a third of the cost of a new console - the price-tag being just south of £100 at the time of writing. But just how does such a card stack up to the console experience when playing Battlefield 4 or Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag? And indeed, can we go one further in the visual stakes - while still hitting the same performance targets?First things first, let's address a few salient points on the card itself. The 260X is a through-and-through rebrand of the Radeon HD 7790 we reviewed last year, complete with the very same 28nm processed Bonaire XT chipset (in itself, the basis for the Xbox One GPU) - but now with minor clock tweaks and a cheaper price-tag. The changes are easy to list: we get a core clock bump of 10 per cent, going from 1GHz to 1.1GHz. Otherwise, the restrictive 128-bit memory bus remains, but the memory speed increase to 6.5GHz (compared to 6GHz on the 7790) means a fill-rate of 102.4GB/s is now possible - a respectable update over the 96GB/s of the last card.In terms of features, this refresh gets all the potential benefits of AMD's as-yet untested Mantle interface (an alternative to DirectX that's soon to be supported by Battlefield 4). As a bonus, the 260X also comes with a dedicated TrueAudio sound processing unit, absent from its pricier 270X and 280X siblings. This works entirely independently of graphical tasks, allowing developers to add spatialisation, reverb and a mastering of sound not possible on most users' motherboard sound.

Radeon R7 260X specs

Currently doing the rounds at just shy of the £100 mark, the 260X offers GCN 1.1 features such as Mantle support, plus audio processing courtesy of a new TrueAudio chip. This is an HD 7790 at its heart though, shipping on the same PCB with only a few modest clock changes - with performance gains that would be best described as marginal. Nevertheless, it's a worthy enough budget GPU and as we'll see, it has enough horsepower deliver an experience as good as the next-gen console launch titles.

• 1.1GHz Core Engine clock
• 2GB GDDR5 memory
• 1625MHz memory clock (6.5GHz effective)
• 128-bit memory bus
• 104GB/s memory bandwidth
• 1.97 TFLOPs single precision compute power
• GCN 1.1 Architecture
• 14 Compute Units
• 16 ROPs
• 56 Texture Units
• PCI Express 3.0 x16 bus interface

The cheeky twist is that, while these sound processing tricks are new to the 260X, the on-board chip has in fact been present and inactive all this time on the 7790's PCB - a card that released almost a year ago. But we won't dwell on that...

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