10 Aug 2021 - Graphics card reviewed

The Radeon R9 280X Sapphire Vapor-X 3GB OC Edition is a very low performing piece of gaming hardware and can probably only run indie system requirements.

DirectX 11 gaming system requirements will be met by this gpu.

Game performance for the Radeon R9 280X Sapphire Vapor-X 3GB OC Edition where we look at the bigger games played in 2023. Looking closely at the graphics card frame rate performance on Ultra graphics settings at 1080p, 1440p and 4K screen resolutions. This card runs recommended graphics requirements of 232 games from the top 1000 most demanding games being played today.

Running at 1080p this card gets a weak frame rate from Back 4 Blood with 20 FPS on Ultra. Then we take a look at Dying Light 2 which returns a weak 1 FPS. Another title that we looked at is the popular Resident Evil 8 which we saw getting a weak 0 FPS.

As the PC gaming masses explore larger screen resolutions we decided to run some game checks at 1440p across a few popular games. We discovered the Radeon R9 280X Sapphire Vapor-X 3GB OC Edition ran Back 4 Blood to a weak performance level. Results across the graphics settings looked like this, Low: 40 FPS, Medium: 32 FPS, High: 21 FPS and Ultra: 15 FPS. Another game tested was Dying Light 2, L: 2FPS, M: 2FPS, H: 1FPS, U: 1FPS. And then we checked graphics card performance on Resident Evil 8, which returned L: 0FPS, M: 0FPS, H: 0FPS, U: 0FPS at 1440p. In summary we feel the Radeon R9 280X Sapphire Vapor-X 3GB OC Edition running at 1440p is going to underperform if you try and run modern games.

How many years will the Radeon R9 280X Sapphire Vapor-X 3GB OC Edition graphics card play newly released games and how long until you should consider upgrading the Radeon R9 280X Sapphire Vapor-X 3GB OC Edition in your PC? 12-18 months of top end gaming is still left in this graphics card

Whats a good PC graphics upgrade for the Radeon R9 280X Sapphire Vapor-X 3GB OC Edition? If you want an upgrade suggestion for the Radeon R9 280X Sapphire Vapor-X 3GB OC Edition then a good choice would be RX 5000 Series Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB as this is better than 716 of the top 1000 most demanding game requirements with 52% better performance as well. Alternatively if you are thinking of upgrading this graphics card then we would currently suggest the RX 5000 Series Radeon RX 5300. This PC hardware upgrade performs 22% better and can run 300 of today’s 1000 most demanding PC games.