Quote Originally Posted by Fenweigh View Post
Esp. Dracian for pointing me toward Heavensward system requirements in the graphics card area. For the Radeon cards, minimum is the HD 4770. recommended is the HD 7950 or higher. These numbers they put on are really meaningless, an 8240 doesn't sound like it should be so low end but apparently it is.

Their naming conventions do suck. But after awhile you get used to them. In the older (4 number) cards the first number is the generation of the card. So your 8000 series card is actually newer than a 7000 series, but that doesn't mean much. The 2nd number in the chain is really the most important one. A 7850 is more powerful than your 8240. The last two numbers are variants of the card (higher is better). So a 7870 is better than a 7850, but a 7950 is better than the 7870. This MOSTLY holds true.

Now they've swapped to a slightly different naming method. There's R5, R7, and R9 series. R5 and R7 are typically weaker low-to-mid range GPUs that aren't really made for gaming. The R9 series is the main gaming series. In that case the first number is the generation and the next two numbers are the real card power. For example: R9 380 < R9 380x < R9 390 < R9 390x. However, just to make things confusing, AMD likes to re-use cards across generations. For example, my R9 380 is almost identical to the R9 285 from the previous generation. Also note that a R9 290 would be stronger than an R9 380, though it is older.

Hope that makes sense, it's a bit convoluted if you haven't been into AMD cards before.