Benchmarks: The Witcher 3, Star Wars Battlefront
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has been tested using the medium quality settings while HairWorks has been disabled. These mild quality settings proved far too much for the HD 5830 as it averaged just 15fps. Pushing that result forward by 40%, the 6870 still only delivered 21fps on average. The 7850 was 38% faster again, though it too failed to deliver playable performance.
Finally, with another 38% performance boost using the Radeon R9 270X we achieve playable performance with an average of 40fps. The R9 380 was able to provide a further 35% performance boost hitting a 54fps average. However, it was AMD's latest mid-range GPU that provided the biggest step forward, boosting the frame rate by 48% with an 80fps average.
Star Wars Battlefront not only looks great but is also relatively hardware-friendly. The old HD 5830 might have come up short, but we were still surprised to find a 26fps average using the high quality preset at 1080p. The 6870 was 27% faster at 33fps, but it was the huge 42% boost seen when moving to the 7850 that landed us playable performance.
Things got better from there. The R9 270X averaged 63fps, or 34% faster than the 7850. The R9 380 was just 22% faster than the R9 270X this time and we saw a massive 42% performance increase for the RX 480 over the R9 380 as AMD's latest-generation GPU breaks the 100fps barrier.