I can’t remember the last time I took a look at a graphics card that hovered around the $100 price-point, but for a couple of reasons, I couldn’t wait to dig into AMD’s $109 Radeon R7 260.

For starters, with the roll-out of the “next-generation” consoles having wrapped-up, my interest in modestly priced GPUs has recently piqued. As I’m sure is clear by now, neither the Xbox One or PlayStation 4 offer the sort of graphics we envisioned a couple of years ago for a “next-gen” model. When “price” and “size” are the major focuses during development, compromises have to be made, and those have been made quite obvious here.

Tying into that, I often see console fans around the Web claim that PC gaming is “expensive”. For a solid build, that’s true; the up-front cost will be more. But to compare the PC as a platform to consoles in an apples-to-apples manner is a bit unfair. Unlike consoles, PCs are part of an open platform – they can be upgraded, and otherwise poked and prodded in ways consoles can’t be (take game mods, for example). So, while a good PC might cost more than a console, it’ll offer a much higher level of flexibility.

For those reasons, AMD’s $109 R7 GPU comes at a great time, as it allows us to see what a truly affordable card can pull off. All of our benchmarks focus on the 1080p resolution, which is notable since many blockbuster games on the latest consoles are limited to 720p to preserve smooth performance.

There’s a Techgage reason for AMD’s R7 260 dropping at a good time, as well: This is the first GPU review where we’ve implemented a proper “Best Playable” feature. While we’ve dabbled with this idea in the past, we’ve worked over the mechanics and plan to include it in all of our future GPU reviews.

The reason this feature is important: Our goal is to find the best graphics configuration that will allow a game to run at 1080p with an average performance of 60 FPS – or at least close to it. And because a visual cue has never hurt anyone, we’ll be providing an ingame screenshot for each title which was snapped using the same graphics settings we provide. With these screenshots, you’ll be able to see exactly what you’d be getting, all with the realization that you’d be enjoying the game at a cool 60 FPS.

I’ll explain the feature a bit more on that page, but for now, let’s take a quick look at AMD’s current-gen lineup:

AMD Radeon Cores Core MHz Memory Mem MHz Mem Bus TDP Price R9 290X 2816 1000 4096MB 5000 512-bit 250W $549 R9 290 2560 947 4096MB 5000 512-bit 250W $399 R9 280X 2048 <1000 3072MB 6000 384-bit 250W $299 R9 270X 1280 <1050 2048MB 5600 256-bit 180W $199 R9 270 1280 <925 2048MB 5600 256-bit 150W $179 R7 260X 896 <1100 2048MB 6500 128-bit 115W $139 R7 260 768 <1000 1024MB 6000 128-bit 95W $109 R7 250 384 <1050 1024MB 4600 128-bit 65W $89

The R7 260 utilizes the same architectural design as the R7 260X, but a couple of important changes have been made. The biggest one is a drop of GDDR5 density, from 2GB to 1GB. I don’t like seeing 1GB framebuffers in this day and age, so a secondary goal while testing will be seeing how much of a detriment it proves to be at our target resolution of 1080p.

The other changes include a slight drop in cores (from 896 to 768), and a drop in clock speed (from 1.1GHz to 1.0GHz). As would be expected, these changes also result in a lower power draw; -20W in this particular instance, resulting in a rating of 95W.

Thanks to the introduction of our Best Playable feature (and the swapping out of two games), I’ve had to start the process of rebenchmarking our current fleet of GPUs. So for this review, I’m just going to have results from both of these cards in question, which is all well and good given the next step up GPU-wise would bring us to the $200 price-point (I do not have an NVIDIA card on-hand which is priced like either of these two AMD cards, and current-gen models that would be suitable are not available).

With all of that said, let’s proceed to our testing methodology page, and then get right into testing.