Tomb Raider, Division & Witcher 3
Rise of the Tomb Raider
AMD’s Radeon RX 470 delivers on the company’s promise to drive playable frame rates using high-quality settings and anti-aliasing.
The fact that Rise of the Tomb Raider supports DirectX 12 now doesn’t help AMD as much as we’ve seen in other titles. However, Radeon RX 480 doesn’t trail GeForce GTX 1060 by much, and the RX 470’s 56 FPS average with SMAA enabled is impressive. At the very least, you get a big speed-up compared to first-gen GCN.
Patch #7 enables asynchronous compute for GCN 1.1-based GPUs, possibly explaining why R9 380 is 21% faster than R9 280X. That’s the kind of delta we’re only seeing in DX12-based games thus far (check Hitman and AotS as well).
The Division
AMD’s Radeon RX 480 leads the 470 by 14% in The Division. It keeps pace with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060, and beats the more expensive GeForce GTX 970.
The Witcher 3
Our last benchmark shows AMD’s Radeon RX 480 with a 17% lead over RX 470, which in turn easily outmaneuvers the previous-gen R9 380 and Nvidia’s $200 GeForce GTX 960. It nearly doubles the performance of Radeon R9 280X, based on the once-mighty Tahiti GPU. Playable? You bet.
The smoothness chart helps illustrate why the 2GB cards struggle so much: too-little memory causes significant spikes through the first 40% or so of our test run. Charting frame time across the run bears this out, simultaneously illustrating high/peaky frame times from the R9 280X.
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