First off, the obvious: The 1080p GPU benchmark, as you'll see, places a GTX 970 above an R9 390X by about 5.1%. We did not expect this to happen in Fallout 4 and set forth to validate the findings. We thought we'd located the setting creating the 970's lead when tweaking each option, eventually noticing that Shadow Distance impacted results by nearly 20FPS - enough to close the gap - but that then reproduced my initial result. When setting Shadow Distance to its lowest setting (medium) on both the R9 390X and GTX 970, the result still posts the 970 by a couple of frames ahead of the 390X. Actually, it's nearly the same ~5% gap. It's not Shadow Distance, then. We tried every other setting and could not find one that produced a profound performance hit for AMD when it did not also do such for nVidia.

That leads me to believe this is either a game optimization or, more likely, a driver optimization issue. We contacted AMD late last week in search of the seemingly-inevitable Fallout 4 day-one drivers, but were told the drivers weren't ready yet.

It is possible that the 390X will outpace the GTX 970 at 1080p with a driver update or game optimization patch, but the data (as below) is how it stands right now.

1080/ultra settings allow Fallout 4 to stretch down to the $225 GTX 960 and R9 285 ($206) region, which would also include (not present) the R9 380. The GTX 950 isn't quite enough to push 1080/ultra, the 960 can make it work with some light tweaking or just by accepting ~50FPS, and the R9 285 operates at 54FPS average. The R9 285 tanks its 0.1% low frametimes down to 30 on occasion, but it's nothing that ruins the experience.

Based on these charts, to play Fallout 4 at 1080/max requires about a GTX 960 ($225) or R9 380 ($230) for best fluidity during peak workloads within the game. Tuning settings to "High" will allow the GTX 950 ($170) and deprecated R9 270X (equivalent: R7 370 for $150) to approach the "playable" FPS range.

At the high-end, the GTX 980 Ti, 980, 970, R9 390X, and R9 290X are all capable performers that regularly exceed 60FPS using 1080/ultra. Fallout 4 isn't the kind of game where you need more than 60FPS, though, especially because it's got an FPS lock capping framerates to 60 by default.