AMD Radeon R7 370

AMD Radeon R7 370

AMD Radeon R7 370 in 2025: Is This Graphics Card Worth Considering?

Review for Budget Gamers and Office Users


Introduction

In 2025, the graphics card market is flooded with innovations: ray tracing, AI rendering, and 8K resolutions. However, for many users, the key factor remains price. The AMD Radeon R7 370, a card from 2015, is still available for sale as an affordable solution. Let's explore who might find it suitable today.


Architecture and Key Features

Core: Graphics Core Next (GCN 1.0) architecture, 28nm manufacturing process.

Features:

- No hardware support for ray tracing or equivalent to DLSS.

- Compatibility with FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) via drivers—this technology enhances image clarity without taxing the GPU.

- Support for DirectX 12 (Feature Level 12_0), Vulkan 1.3, OpenGL 4.6.

The card was designed for basic tasks, hence modern features like FSR 3.0 or Ray Tracing are not available.


Memory: Modest Specs

Type and Capacity: 4 GB GDDR5.

Bus and Bandwidth: 256-bit bus, 179 GB/s.

Impact on Performance:

- For 2025 games, 4 GB of VRAM is the minimum threshold. In projects like Cyberpunk 2077 or Starfield, high-quality textures can cause stutter due to buffer overflows.

- In office tasks and older games (e.g., CS:GO, Dota 2), the memory is more than sufficient.


Gaming Performance: Realistic Expectations

1080p (Low/Medium Settings):

- Fortnite: 45-55 FPS (without FSR).

- Apex Legends: 40-50 FPS.

- GTA V: 60-70 FPS.

- Hogwarts Legacy: 25-30 FPS (minimum settings).

1440p and 4K: Not recommended—frame rates drop below 30 FPS even in less demanding titles.

Ray Tracing: Not supported. In games with hybrid rendering (e.g., Shadow of the Tomb Raider), enabling RTX will reduce FPS to 10-15.


Professional Tasks: Limited Applicability

- Video Editing: Can handle rendering in 1080p in DaVinci Resolve or Premiere Pro, but for 4K or effects, a more powerful card is necessary.

- 3D Modeling: In Blender and AutoCAD—only simple scenes. OpenCL acceleration works, but it’s slower than modern GPUs.

- Scientific Calculations: Not suitable for complex simulations.


Power Consumption and Heat Dissipation

TDP: 150W.

Recommendations:

- Power Supply: At least 450W (e.g., Corsair CX450).

- Cooling: A card with 2 fans (Sapphire Nitro) or a turbine (reference design).

- Case: Essential to have 2-3 fans for intake and exhaust.

Even under load, the GPU rarely heats above 75°C, but thermal throttling might occur in compact cases.


Comparison with Competitors

2025 Analogues (new, $120-150):

- NVIDIA GTX 1650 (4 GB GDDR6): 20-30% faster in games, supports DLSS 1.0.

- AMD RX 6400 (4 GB GDDR6): Better performance in DX12/Vulkan, but requires PCIe 4.0.

- Intel Arc A380 (6 GB GDDR6): Handles modern APIs better, but the drivers are unstable.

Conclusion: The R7 370 falls behind even budget newcomers but has the advantage in price (around $80-100 for a new card).


Practical Tips

1. Power Supply: 450-500W with 80+ Bronze certification (EVGA 500 BQ).

2. Compatibility:

- Motherboard: PCIe 3.0 x16 (backward compatibility with PCIe 2.0).

- CPU: Will not bottleneck with Ryzen 3 3200G or Intel i3-10100.

3. Drivers: Use Adrenalin 22.6.1—the latest stable version for GCN 1.0.


Pros and Cons

✅ Pros:

- Low price ($80-100).

- Energy efficiency for its class.

- Quiet operation in idle mode.

❌ Cons:

- No support for modern technologies (FSR 3.0, Ray Tracing).

- Limited performance in new games.

- Risk of encountering used units marketed as new.


Final Verdict: Who is the R7 370 Suitable For?

- Budget Gamers: Suitable for playing older or less demanding games (Indie projects, MOBA).

- Office PCs: Supports 4K monitors via DisplayPort, accelerates rendering in browsers.

- Spare GPU: As a temporary replacement until a new card is purchased.

Alternative: If the budget allows, add $50-70 and get an AMD RX 6400 or NVIDIA GTX 1650—providing more upgrade options.


Conclusion

The Radeon R7 370 in 2025 is a choice for those who value minimalism and are not chasing ultra settings. It serves as a “workhorse” for basic tasks but nothing more. If your goal is comfortable gaming for new releases, it is worth considering more modern solutions.

Basic

Label Name
AMD
Platform
Desktop
Launch Date
June 2015
Model Name
Radeon R7 370
Generation
Pirate Islands
Base Clock
925MHz
Boost Clock
975MHz
Bus Interface
PCIe 3.0 x16
Transistors
2,800 million
Compute Units
16
TMUs
?
Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.
64
Foundry
TSMC
Process Size
28 nm
Architecture
GCN 1.0

Memory Specifications

Memory Size
2GB
Memory Type
GDDR5
Memory Bus
?
The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.
256bit
Memory Clock
1400MHz
Bandwidth
?
Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.
179.2 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate
?
Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.
31.20 GPixel/s
Texture Rate
?
Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.
62.40 GTexel/s
FP64 (double)
?
An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.
124.8 GFLOPS
FP32 (float)
?
An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.
1.957 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units
?
The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.
1024
L1 Cache
16 KB (per CU)
L2 Cache
512KB
TDP
110W
Vulkan Version
?
Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.
1.2
OpenCL Version
1.2
OpenGL
4.6
DirectX
12 (11_1)
Power Connectors
1x 6-pin
Shader Model
5.1
ROPs
?
The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.
32
Suggested PSU
300W

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)
Score
1.957 TFLOPS
3DMark Time Spy
Score
1477

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS
2.046 +4.5%
2.01 +2.7%
3DMark Time Spy
5182 +250.8%
3906 +164.5%
2755 +86.5%
1769 +19.8%