AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB Review

How We Tested Radeon RX 480

While we wish the testing we did for our GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 reviews was relevant to the Radeon RX 480, the cards are in a different league. As such, we’re dropping 4K altogether and adding 1920x1080 to our 2560x1440 results. We’re also carrying over our Skylake-based platform. From the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Pascal Review:

“Instead of our Haswell-E-based Core i7-5930K at 3.5GHz, we’re using a Skylake-based Core i7-6700K at 4GHz, giving us two generations worth of IPC improvements and an extra 500MHz base clock rate to alleviate host processing bottlenecks wherever they may surface. Of course, the CPU’s LGA 1151 interface also calls for a different motherboard—we tapped MSI’s Z170A Gaming M7 for all of our game benchmarks, and dropped in G.Skill’s F4-3000C15Q-16GRR memory kit composed of four 4GB modules at DDR4-3000. Crucial’s MX200 SSD remains, as does the Noctua NH-12S cooler and be quiet! Dark Power Pro 10 850W power supply.

Gone is Windows 8.1, though. Prior to benchmarking, we installed a clean version of Windows 10 Professional and a new suite of games representing popular AAA titles, some DirectX 12-specific selections and a mix of genres”

The Radeon RX 480’s competition wasn’t as apparent, so we did a big of experimenting prior to committing to a line-up. For sure, we wanted the GeForce GTX 970 and Radeon R9 290 in there—both boards represent recommendations from HTC and Oculus for their head-mounted displays. Given AMD’s emphasis on VR for this launch, we knew the RX 480 would need to at least be as fast as both prior-gen boards. With that in mind, AMD’s Radeon R9 390 and 390X also made sense to compare. So did the GeForce GTX 980. Down low, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 960 sets the performance floor.

Now, we didn’t have reference examples of every card, and some of our partner boards exhibit strange behavior when they’re pinned at reference clock rates. Thus, our numbers are going to be almost universally a little faster than AMD’s and Nvidia’s launch hardware. The cards we used include:

Drivers and Benchmarks

All of the GeForce cards utilize the newest driver available on Nvidia’s site, 368.39. AMD’s boards are powered by an unreleased beta build called Crimson Edition 16.6.2.

The benchmark suite itself remains similar to what we ran in the GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 reviews, except for the addition of Metro: Last Light Redux, bringing our total number of tests up to nine. The Ashes charts represent DirectX 12 performance using the game’s built-in benchmark/logging tool. Hitman and Tomb Raider are presented using DirectX 11. However, we have results from DirectX 12 using those games as well, which we’ll mention in the analysis (spoiler: in most cases, performance drops with DirectX 12). Everything else is DirectX 11-based, recorded with Fraps.”