10 Aug 2021 - Graphics card reviewed

This Radeon R9 280 Crossfire graphics card is considered budget with poor modern game performance when playing anything more demanding than indie game requirements.

This card meets game requirements up to DirectX 11.

Here is a performance review on how capable the Radeon R9 280 Crossfire is at running the more popular games of 2022. Specifically looking at this PC hardware’s ability to get suitable frames per second to play on Ultra game settings and what FPS it might get on 1080p, 1440p and 4K screen res. When considering how well this graphics card can run the 1000 most demanding games available today it can best 372 of the games’ recommended graphics requirements.

First we looked at 1080p resolution for the Radeon R9 280 Crossfire performance to explore what sort of benchmarks it would achieve on the popular title Far Cry 6 and saw it deliver weak frames per second across the following graphics settings - Low: 44 FPS, Medium: 34 FPS, High: 23 FPS and Ultra: 17 FPS. We proceeded to look at Star Citizen to see how that compared and predict that it will return a reasonable 50 FPS at Ultra 1080p.

One of the growing popular screen resolutions for PC gaming is the wider 1440p. So we wanted to see how well the Radeon R9 280 Crossfire performed at 1440p by taking a look at some of the current popular games. First we looked at Far Cry 6 and saw it deliver weak frames per second across the following graphics settings - Low: 33 FPS, Medium: 26 FPS, High: 18 FPS and Ultra: 13 FPS. We then checked the performance on Star Citizen to predict if that will run well. It is predicted to be playable with a 38 FPS at Ultra 1440p. 1440p gaming on the Radeon R9 280 Crossfire is in need of some graphics adjustments to get some stability, which means its not an ideal gaming resolution for this GPU.

How many years will the Radeon R9 280 Crossfire graphics card play newly released games and how long until you should consider upgrading the Radeon R9 280 Crossfire in your PC? This Radeon R9 280 Crossfire card has 12 to 18 months of latest AAA game play left in it before upgrading should be considered

Whats a good PC graphics upgrade for the Radeon R9 280 Crossfire? Upgrading this graphics card would have us consider the 30 Series GeForce RTX 3050 Ti which is 76% more powerful. This upgrade choice can also run 972 games from the most demanding games today. Alternatively a good upgrade choice for this graphics card today would be the R-500 Series Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB. For comparison of the 1000 most demanding games around today this suggested upgrade is 67% better and can meet 961 of their recommended requirements.