What kind of FPS can I get with a GTX 660 and FX-8370?

[JBDelta]

Hey Guys,

So, I am planning on picking up a FX-8370 for sure, but, I have a problem. I am planning on also getting an HIS R9 285 but some people told me that the GTX 660 would get better FPS. What do you guys think?

Thanks in advance!

 

[bootcher]

The R9 285 performs better than the GTX 660. I would not recommend getting a GTX 660 as it is an outdated GPU. Even a R9 280 performs better than a GTX 660:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1039?vs=1332

 

[madmatt30]

Dont buy a gtx 660,& dont buy a r9 285 over a r9 280 if at all possible & prices are similar ,the r9 280 is & always will be the better card of the 2,the extra 1gb vram is beneficial in new games &fps wise there is nothing between them.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-r9-285-tonga,3925.html

 

[JBDelta]

Thanks for the help guys! I'll get the HIS R9 285

 

[McDuncun]

Thats a good choice... I`m running a GTX 660 and I still regret it today...

 

[madmatt30]

Don't buy an 8370 - they're not worth the premium.
Just grab an 8320 & an aftermarket cooler like the raijentek themis for $20
Youll hit 4ghz easily at stock voltage & have a quieter system to boot & still save $30-$40.
I would take a 280 over the 285 personally - performance is incredibly similar & the extra 1gb vram is a bonus.

 

[mdocod]

JBDelta,

Performance originates with the CPU. For all intents and purposes, the CPU performance and monitor refresh rate are your HARD caps on FPS.

The GTX660, R9 285, and R9 280 can all plays games at the same frame-rate but with slightly different visual quality settings. GPU's do not impose a meaningful hard cap on performance. Any modern gaming GPU ~$100+ can play pretty much any game at 60FPS. In actual implementation, the difference between an R7 250X and an R9 290, will manifest as the difference between 720P vs 1440P.

To get an idea of the "separation" in render performance between an R9 280 and a GTX660, they will achieve approximately the same FPS in GPU bound conditions at 1920X1080 and 1600X900 respectively, all other things being equal.

In CPU bound conditions (this is where the CPU is the bottleneck), the GTX660 will indirectly facilitate higher FPS than the R9 285/280 in DX11 games due to Nvidia's driver and DX11 implementation, which makes better use of available CPU execution resources, effectively lifting that CPU limited ceiling higher than it would be when running the AMD implementation. Ironically, it is Nvidia's implementation of DX11 that makes better use of a PileDriver CPU's intercore parallelism.

If you were to configure a pair of machines side by side, one with the R9 280 and the other with the GTX660, everything else equal (assuming an FX-83XX here), configured to the same visual quality settings, The R9 280 would have approximately 25% higher peak FPS in GPU bound conditions, and up to 20% lower minimum FPS in CPU bound conditions. To put than in perspective, if the R9 280 is doing 40-70FPS as it shifts from CPU to GPU bound conditions in a compute intensive multiplier game, the GTX660 will be doing 50-56FPS instead.

A far more intelligent solution, would be to pair the high value AMD GPU solution with an i5 haswell instead of that FX-8370, then you'd have 60-70FPS in those same conditions as the previous example instead (that's solid V-Sync baby).