Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Benchmarked, Performance Review

[Evernessince]

Hm... I've been an MGS fan for a long time, remember playing the demo of MGS1 (on PC) and going through MGS2 on a GeForce 2 MMX (again, on PC...), so while not stunning, they were very playable. Now even if I'm not meeting the requirements for MGSV / MGS:GZ I've downloaded and am currently playing through Grond Zeroes. On AMD Phenom II X4 965 (~3.5Ghz), 8GB of DDR2 RAM and GeForce GTX 560. Yup. Lower than the minimum requiremetns. And guess what? It's speedy, playable and smooth. True, I didn't crank the setting to the max, but still the game looks superb. I'm wondering if MGSV would run similarly or just that the one level in Ground Zeroes is optimized to hell and back.

Phenom II is still AMD's best gaming chip to be honest. There's really nothing you can upgrade to unless you go intel.

Great review. Unfortunate that Fury cards are still so rare. The fps cap is unfortunate too. Hopefully they'll lift it in a future patch.

As for the game itself, the horrible "The Way It's Meant to be Played" manifests again with AMD GPUs having less than ideal performance. For AMD owners, this game will be worth visiting some months down the line after the Red Team had the proper time to release optimized drivers.

A 780 delivering better performance than a 390X at 1440p and same performance at 4K ? Preposterous !

Is a 390x just a rebranded 290x? In which case the 780 performs at a very similar level. Maybe even slightly better in most games.

The way it's meant to be played has always annoyed me. Nvidia started going really heavy in that direction during the first borderland and every time a game started with that I knew it was going to have issues. The only things Nvidia engineers "help" these devs. do is cripple the game for AMD and most of the time, to a lesser extent, their own cards. Nvidia will keep doing this because most gamers just want the best card for the game.

A 390x is not just a rebranded 290x. All the 300 series cards are a refresh. Hardware features like Free-Sync were added and the power delivery system was re-designed. Efficiency wise, it helps bridge the gap between the 200 series and maxwell. I'm honestly surprise AMD doesn't drop the Fury X down a tier and make a full sized card based on fiji. I'm guessing the supply issues have something to do with that at the moment.

 

[FernandoEffting]

How come a R9 390X can even beat the GTX970? The way its meant to be played is just a horrible thing Nvidia does for the gaming community in general...Thats one reason I stoped buying Nvidia cards, cause I dont support that kind of thing.

 

[Cryio]

Phenom II is still AMD's best gaming chip to be honest. There's really nothing you can upgrade to unless you go intel.

This isn't really true. An Athlon 860K is faster than the fastest clocked Phenom II, even overclocked.

An FX 6300 overclocked is faster than a 860K. It goes without saying that any FX 83x0 or 9xx0 CPUs are faster than an FX 6300 simply due to having 8 threads vs 6.

Phenom II CPUs are a major bottleneck for the majority of GPUs these days. Using an Athlon however, you can get by up to 270X/370X/950/960 levels of performance and using overclocked FX 63x0/83x0/9xx0 you can get by up to 960/380/280X/780 levels of performance.

Anything GPU stronger than that and you start needing Intel's i5.

 

[Evernessince]

This isn't really true. An Athlon 860K is faster than the fastest clocked Phenom II, even overclocked.

An FX 6300 overclocked is faster than a 860K. It goes without saying that any FX 83x0 or 9xx0 CPUs are faster than an FX 6300 simply due to having 8 threads vs 6.

Phenom II CPUs are a major bottleneck for the majority of GPUs these days. Using an Athlon however, you can get by up to 270X/370X/950/960 levels of performance and using overclocked FX 63x0/83x0/9xx0 you can get by up to 960/380/280X/780 levels of performance.

Anything GPU stronger than that and you start needing Intel's i5.

The Athlon is a bit faster so anyone who already has a phenom II is wasting money if they were to buy the Athlon chip.

An FX is only faster if the game is multi-threaded. If not then it's weak single core performance is going to be slower the an Phenom.

 

[robb213]

How come a R9 390X can even beat the GTX970? The way its meant to be played is just a horrible thing Nvidia does for the gaming community in general...Thats one reason I stoped buying Nvidia cards, cause I dont support that kind of thing.

TWIMTBP is completely different from GameWorks. TWIMTBP is just a licensing agreement where Nvidia funds the game. AMD Gaming Evolved is the same exact thing. It doesn't necessarily mean that the vendor helping to fund through contractual obligations will see better performance--although that tends to be the case.

And the 390X performs equally to the 970 at 1080p/4K, within a margin of error. Game runs great with whatever you have. Maybe Steve will manage to snag a Fury X for testing eventually

 

[Cryio]

And the 390X performs equally to the 970 at 1080p/4K, within a margin of error. Game runs great with whatever you have.

Both the 390 and 390X are faster than a 970 at both 1080p and 1440p usually. The fact that a 390X is slower than a 780 in MGSV is insane.

 

[BlackCarT]

And the 390X performs equally to the 970 at 1080p/4K, within a margin of error. Game runs great with whatever you have.

Both the 390 and 390X are faster than a 970 at both 1080p and 1440p usually. The fact that a 390X is slower than a 780 in MGSV is insane.

beyond INSANE. I cant believe it.