Should I upgrade to Radeon R9 390s in CF, R9 Fury or a GTX 980 Ti?

Hello, I am currently running an AMD Radeon R9 290, but I'm wanting to upgrade. Should I get R9 390s in CrossFire, an R9 Fury or the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti.

Or, just stay with this and wait till the new ones come out later this year.

Hey there Ricardo,

Your current card is pretty damn good, but I can definitely see that you want to upgrade - especially with DX12 here, and VR headsets out in March and April from Oculus and HTC, respectively. As for your upgrade path, all three choices would be good, but let's break them down.

AMD Radeon R9 390 Crossfire - This will be the most powerful of them all, easily achieving 1080p @ 120FPS, 1440p at close to 120FPS and 4K at 60FPS without a problem. VR gaming would be great on this setup too. The only issue I would have is the power consumption and heat. We tested R9 390X cards in Crossfire, where they used up to 800W depending on the test. These were the 390X and not the 390, but the power consumption numbers would be close.

AMD Radeon R9 Fury - This is another fine choice, as you would achieve 60FPS at 1080p and 1440p without a problem, and 60FPS at 4K if you adjusted some of the in-game visual settings. But, HBM2-based cards are on the way, so you might want to hold off here.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti - This is the most powerful single GPU choice, the GTX 980 Ti. You will definitely hit 60FPS at 1080p and 1440p, and as with the R9 Fury - if you adjusted some in-game settings, you'd reach 60FPS at 4K, too. But, as I warned with the R9 Fury, there are HBM2-based offerings on the horizon.

Waiting to upgrade - Right now, unless you desperately needed to upgrade; wait. The next-gen offerings are only months away, and they should offer the biggest leap in performance per watt we've ever seen. We're looking at the combination of next-gen architecture (Pascal and Polaris), as well as 14nm and 16nm nodes, and then the mix of faster GDDR5X and HBM2 technologies.

My advice would be to wait. There are some truly exciting things that are about to be unleashed onto gamers in the form of next-gen video cards, and it's going to be super exciting. If you don't end up with one of the new cards, you could always wait until others upgrade, and sell on their old R9 390, R9 Fury or GTX 980 Ti cards...

Last updated: Nov 3, 2020 at 07:10 pm CST