Just Cause 3 – AMD VS Nvidia Performance Review
Conclusion
When a game is as highly anticipated and popular as Just Cause 3 comes to PC we always expect that it will be made to work well on GPUs from both vendors, but it is clear with Just Cause 3 that there is something in this game that is severely harming the ability of AMD GPUs to deliver a constant high framerate, especially while driving at high speeds.
At the games highest settings AMD and Nvidia’s performance is pretty much on par, but when we try to get a higher framerate by lowering the settings something simply preventing AMD from getting a constant stable 60FPS+ framerate. Nvidia has a much better time achieving high framerates in this game, which can be seen clearly by how large the performance gap is between AMD and Nvidia as we lower the settings.
The game offers a wide range of graphical options to change, but unless you are using an Nvidia GPU your framerate improvements will be very limited. During typical gameplay AMD and Nvidia do perform very similarly, but when a lot of stuff starts happening AMD’s performance can tank hard, which is something that AMD and Avalanche Studios will really need to look into.
When I first started playing this game I really thought that this game had done a great job with it’s PC version, but where Avalanche Studios has done well with rebind-able PC controls, a detailed options menu and creating a game which is playable at max setting at 4K on modern hardware they have failed when it comes to getting the game to run well on GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia.
The problems with AMD are not unique to the R9 Fury X alone, as the same results were seen when using AMD’s lower end R9 380 at 1080p. Hopefully AMD will be able to fix this issue with a future driver, but until then this game simply just prefers Nvidia.
At both low and high settings this game look great, with the higher game setting mostly improving the distant details, with all close areas of the game looking great at both low and high settings.
If you are looking for a game that is full of crazy, fun times this game is it, but if you cannot stand playing a game unless it is playing at a steady 60+ FPS you will run into issues if you are using an AMD GPU when playing certain sections of the game.
You can join the discussion on Just Cause 3’s PC performance on the OC3D Forums.
