Radeon R9 380 Recommended Budget Card

[SqwkHappy]

 Hey fellow pilots.

 

 If anyone has been looking for a new budget card and AMD isn't a four letter word to you, I recommend the R9 380. I just purchased the PowerColor R9 380 for $190 + $20 mail-in rebate (newegg) and it runs IL2: BoS well.

 

 At 1776x1000x60hz resolution, Ultra settings with 4x Antialiasing, HDR and Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) turned on it's a real joy to have the better frame rate on the ground and superb frame rate in the air, with no graphical issues to be seen after a few hours of test flights. (Clouds are pristine)

 

 The avg frame rate seems to be in the realm of 45 - 59 FPS, which means disabling a few high-cost options would add 5 or so more FPS avg. Coming from a GeForce GTX 650 Ti, this is a major improvement, especially now that I can run a higher res and ultra settings.

 

 For those wondering, my CPU is an AMD FX-8350 (8 core) oc'd to 4.41ghz per core. The processor is often dubbed as an AMD failure more than anything else, but the combination of the R9 380 and the FX-8350 seem to fair well with this game and other modern games like Fallout 4 as well.  Fallout 4 detects and recommends Ultra settings for this card, I dialed it back a bit but it runs much, much better.

 

 I could not find a good budget nVidia card, but the reference GTX 960 came in just under the R9 380 performance-wise from all the charts I had checked, with a $20-$40 increase in price.

 

 Also, RoF runs very well with super-sampling and bloom turned off, everything maxed except forests on far with the same resolution.