Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Ghost Recon, The Division, and The Witcher 3
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands (DX11)
Our first experience with Ghost Recon Wildlands was our Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB Review, right after the game launched.
In that piece, we saw the GeForce GTX 980 Ti beat a Radeon R9 Fury X, so it’s not particularly surprising that GeForce GTX 1060 6GB does the same to Radeon RX 580. We weren’t, however, expecting Radeon RX 480 to land in front of AMD’s new RX 580.
Drilling down into frame time over the benchmark run, it looks like both the Radeon RX 580 and 570 struggle with spikes throughout our benchmark. This manifests as uncommonly high variance and, ultimately, the two worst smoothness index ratings in our unevenness measurement. We used the Crimson ReLive Edition 17.4.2 driver for AMD’s Radeon RX 480, 470, and R9 380 and a special press driver for RX 580 and 570. Is there a regression of some sort that slipped through in an effort to get the RX 500-series ready?
The same thing happens at 2560x1440. Radeon RX 580’s clock rate advantage is swallowed up by frame time issues only visible when we look our data as granularly as possible. Only the last-place Radeon R9 380 rivals AMD’s new RX 580 and 570 when it comes to >16ms frames in our variance chart.
Tom Clancy’s The Division (DX12)
Whereas Ghost Recon Wildlands is based on the AnvilNext engine, The Division employs Ubisoft’s DirectX 12-enabled Snowdrop engine. AMD’s Radeon RX 580 extends a lead already enjoyed by its RX 480, putting the new card 11% ahead of GeForce GTX 1060 6GB’s average frame rate.
This time around, it’s the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti that demonstrates worrying frame time variance, resulting in a poor unevenness index score.
The RX 580’s lead over GeForce GTX 1060 6GB grows to 15% at 2560x1440, though even the Radeon RX 480 is faster than Nvidia’s board.
Frame time variance in general isn’t great in The Division, but the Radeon RX 580 definitely serves up frames most consistently, according to our measurements.
The Witcher 3 (DX11)
Although The Witcher 3 is a DirectX 11 game, its REDengine 3 runs well on Graphics Core Next products. Radeon RX 580 even secures a lead in our 100-second test sequence. The GeForce GTX 1060 6GB appears slightly faster than RX 480, though AMD’s card achieves better frame pacing.
Similarly, Radeon RX 570 ends up just ahead of the 3GB GeForce GTX 1060 in our average frame rate metric.
The Radeon RX 580 holds up well at 2560x1440 too, keeping its nose above 45 FPS through our run. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 6GB lands just behind the RX 580’s average frame rate. However, isolating frame time variance reveals how much smoother the RX 580 appears to be. Even AMD’s Radeon RX 570 looks more consistent than the 1060 6GB.
MORE: Best Graphics Cards
MORE: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table
MORE: All Graphics Content
Intel tempers expectations for next-gen Falcon Shores AI GPU — Gaudi 3 missed AI wave, Falcon will require fast iterations to be competitive
Minisforum's AM5 mini-PC gets Ryzen 9 9950X upgrade for $919 — adding 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD pushes the price tag to $1,199
Nvidia revives LAN party after 13 years to celebrate RTX 50-series GPU launch — GeForce LAN 50 is a 50-hour LAN party across four different cities
