At first we would like to thank HIS and AMD for offering a key of the Ashes of the Singularity game in order to perform a performance comparison review between AMD cards of the 300 series.

 

 

About HIS:

 

“HIS - Hightech Information System Limited is an internationally acclaimed graphics cards company. Time and time again, HIS were compared and tested by hundreds of worldly renowned critics. The results are phenomena, HIS have proven to offer far superior, cooler, quieter, and faster graphic cards than any other leading rivals. Up to the fourth quarter of 2011, HIS has won over 1600 awards with AMD graphic solution from major media worldwide. HIS is being recognized by providing performance leading and award-wining products: IceQ, IceQ X and Turbo Edition.

HIS was established in 1987 with the mission to produce the highest quality PC products in the industry. Besides strong devotion to excellent products and services, HIS has been conducting business with the aim to "Glorifying God". Honesty and integrity are the two key principals of how HIS are conducted. Ethical business practice has been an everyday commitment to our clients, vendors, and investors.

Headquartered in Hong Kong, and with sales offices and distribution networks in Europe, Middle East, North and South America, Asia Pacific Regions; our worldwide customers benefits from efficient and localized services. ISO Certified, HIS's manufacturing facility in China is managed by a team of professionals with expertise in quality control and production planning. Working with world-class clients, HIS has been consistently meeting high quality standards and fulfilled volume order in short lead-time.

HIS is proud to be AMD's Authorized 1st Tier AIB Partner, Certified Partner and Launching Partner. Long term and favorable relationship with AMD, enable HIS to work closely with AMD to promote the HIS AMD Graphics Board; and to strive for best value on the marketing and sales of HIS AMD Product Line.

In Sept 2003, HIS incorporated the state-of-the art Supreme Cooling Technology in the award winning HIS 9800Pro IceQ, which caught the attention of worldwide media. Since then, HIS IceQ series and the latest IceQ X series has been the limelight in the market for its outstanding performance and features over the other rivals.

Today, HIS continues its avid commitment to quality product and service. HIS is certain to be Your Choice of Graphics Board Supplier.”

In order to perform these tests, we have set up a fresh SSD on our VGA test bench which we have been using for quite some time now to test the cards; Windows 10 Pro with all the updates was installed on it, the latest AMD Crimson drivers but also Steam in order to be able to install the Ashes of Singularity game. The game does feature separate executable files for DirectX11 and DirectX12 but when we have used the DX12 executable, the game was falling back to DX11 so we needed to launch the game in DirectX12 via the Steam launcher shortcut.

 

Test Setup

 

CPU: Intel I5 4690K Retail @ 4.6GHz

CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i GTX

Motherboard: BIOSTAR Z97X Gaming

RAM: GeIL Black Dragon 4x4GB DDR2133 (@1600)

Video: Currently reviewed card

Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W

SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 240GB + OCZ Vertex 460

Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840

 

The following cards participated in our tests:

 

HIS R7 360 Green iCooler OC

HIS R7 370 IceQ X2 OC

HIS R9 380 IceQ X2 OC

HIS R9 380X IceQ X2 Turbo

HIS Radeon R9 390 IceQ X2 OC

HIS Radeon R9 390X IceQ X2 OC

 

We have used the usual resolutions for today's monitors: 1920x1080, 2560x1440 and 4K; regarding the level of details, we did indeed use ALL of the preset settings: Low, Standard, High, Extreme, Crazy. The reason of this type of performance review is to check how the cards do perform in this game at different settings but also which of them benefit from the DirectX12 performance boost.

 

DirectX11 Low

DirectX11 Standard

DirectX11 High

DirectX11 Extreme

DirectX11 Crazy

DirectX12 Low

DirectX12 Standard

DirectX12 High

DirectX12 Extreme

DirectX12 Crazy

Ashes of the Singularity demands quite a bit of hardware resources as we have seen from both DirectX11 and DirectX12 benchmarks. The HIS 360 Green barely struggles with the game in DirectX11 and does not seem to have any decent boosts in DirectX12 either; what we found interesting was the fact that the card started crashing as soon as we have run the DX12 2560x1440 benchmark and continued as we raised the detail levels. A soon as this happened, we tried to install the previous driver version in order to reach the same unfortunate result; since we thought that something could have had developed with the hardware of the card, we ran again some of the DX11 tests but they have completed successfully again.

 

The HIS R7 370 IceQ X2 OC was basically the single card we have tested which did not benefit from any DirectX12 performance boost at Low detail levels; as soon as we have increased the detail levels though, we have seen an improvement but did not seem to matter since the game is not quite playable anyway.

 

The HIS R9 380 IceQ X2 OC is the first card we can say that has no performance issues at the lowest level of details, while running on DX12. With the HIS R9 380X IceQ X2 card, we can see the performance increasing even more, but not enough to justify gaming at Standard detail levels.

 

While working with the HIS 390 IceQ X2 OC video card it is a completely different story, since it can deliver good FPS in both DX11 Low and DX12 Low and Standard, while High detail levels at Full HD resolution can be tried as well. HIS 390X IceQ X2 OC improves even more, making the High detail levels fully playable in DirectX12 even at the 2560x1440 resolution; 4K resolution and Extreme/Crazy detail levels though seem quite a bit of a long reach and for this we would have needed a jump to the AMD Fury series.

 

We would like to thank again to HIS and AMD for making this review possible!