Forza Horizon 4 PC Performance Review

Low-end GPU testing – R9 380 VS GTX 960 – Is 2GB of VRAM enough?

AMD’s Radeon R9 380 and Nvidia’s GTX 960 have been part of our graphics card test suite since 2015, allowing us to judge the performance of games on mid-tier hardware with limited amounts of VRAM. Over time we have gradually seen the gaming world chip away as these two graphics cards, with VRAM requirements increasing as developers learned to utilise the large frame buffers offered by the PS4 and Xbox One (when compared to prior consoles). 

In Forza Horizon 4, game performance takes a nosedive when using AMD’s R9 380 and Nvidia’s GTX 960, offering less than 35% of the performance of our RX 580 and GTX 1060 graphics cards. In most older games, these graphics cards typically provided around 60% of the performance of the RX 580 and GTX 1060. In Forza Horizon 4, the RX 580 and GTX 1060 offer better performance at 4K than the R9 380 and GTX 960 can deliver at 1080p. Time has not been kind to these two graphics cards. 

Our GTX 960 graphics cards can maintain a framerate of over 30FPS at High settings, while the RX 380 needs to use Forza Horizon 4’s medium graphical preset to accomplish the same performance feat. These performance levels can come down to many factors, from VRAM capacity to graphics architecture. We have already seen how Forza Horizon 4 benefits from using AMD’s Vega architecture and Nvidia’s Turing architecture, perhaps the opposite holds true when moving backwards from Polaris to GCN and from Pascal to Maxwell.