AMD Radeon RX 470 4GB Review

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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Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.
  • cknobman
    Uhhhhhhhh, were are all the charts?
    Reply
  • AndrewJacksonZA
    An issue: The Ashes and Battlefield 4 graphs are not displaying.
    Reply
  • n0ns3ns3
    Well ...
    Until I see at least 5 games on Vulcan and 10 on DX12 of different types, I'll not jump into conclusion about AMD vs Nvidia performance.
    So far the clear winners for AMD are the games sponsored by AMD - so couldn't care less about those results.
    Doom is interesting, but any card getting very decent FPS in it.
    Reply
  • AndrewJacksonZA
    Actually, almost all the graphs are missing.
    Reply
  • Another failure by AMD.
    Reply
  • Ergosum
    Indeed. Charts would be nice :)
    Reply
  • Sizzor
    Is it me or every one else where are the charts??
    Reply
  • FormatC
    Cool down.... I've just re-published all galleries and the charts are visible now. The US guys are sleeping but I saw the issue (a follow of your new front-end) and fixed it.

    Please reload the pages again :)
    Reply
  • Stardude82
    Where are the cards? Not seeing them at the big e-retailers.

    Edit: Just went live and they're gone.
    Reply
  • Sizzor
    The MSRP was $149 and looking at the current market the price should be around $180, $200 is way to high for this card.
    Reply