Project CARS, StarCraft 2, Witcher 3 & Warcraft
Project CARS – DX11
Performance in Project CARS appears worryingly low, even when we dial in the game’s Medium quality settings. Due to the nature of this simulator, though, 30 FPS is, in our opinion, playable.
CARS is a DirectX 11-based title, so the elements of AMD’s architecture exploited in DirectX 12 and Vulkan don’t help here (mainly the asynchronous compute engines and hardware/workgroup/wavefront schedulers). As a result, Nvidia’s Maxwell design regains a lot of ground.
Beyond that, first-gen GCN-based cards with more Stream processors and higher clock rates post higher frame rates than RX 460 in CARS. If you look back to the previous page, that’s not always the case. There, RX 460 is often able to beat cards from AMD’s own line-up that should be faster based on their fundamental building blocks. Hawaii was the first GPU with eight ACEs, and AMD kept that configuration through R9 285 and Fury/Fury X. Fourth-gen GCN uses the same command processing logic to great effect in newer titles.
StarCraft II – DX9
Many e-sports titles are benchmarked through a replay system, and StarCraft II is no exception. We loaded the 2016 WCS Circuit match between Polt and Snute, then took 100 seconds of readings from the 3:00 mark using Polt’s point of view.
Averages in the 100+ FPS range are not uncommon in these titles, which are developed with a wide range of hardware in mind. Even using StarCraft’s Ultra quality preset, the RX 460 offers almost 170 FPS. That puts it 28% above the GeForce GTX 750 Ti and an almost inexplicable 61% ahead of AMD’s own Radeon HD 7790.
The Witcher 3 – DX11
AMD’s Radeon RX 460 lands between the R9 270 and 270X in The Witcher 3, putting it 22% above the HD 7790 and 27% higher than GeForce GTX 750 Ti.
Separately, it’s interesting to note that the Radeon RX 470 is 100% faster than the RX 460. We aren’t used to seeing such large gaps between neighboring products in AMD’s line-up.
World of Warcraft – DX11
The 2GB cards seem predisposed to frame time spikes in World of Warcraft, though not necessarily at the same time. AMD’s new Radeon RX 460 doesn’t have the same issue. Though its average frame rate lands at the lower end of our chart, its performance appears more consistent.
With the Legion expansion dropping in a few weeks, upgrading an older 2GB card to an RX 460 could be good for a nice speed-up at 1920x1080.
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