by Rob Williams on June 29, 2016 in Graphics & Displays
The moment many PC gaming enthusiasts have been waiting for is here: AMD’s first Polaris based GPU has arrived. Much of what makes the Radeon RX 480 an alluring card isn’t a secret, as AMD itself has been talking about it quite extensively, so let’s just get right down to business: what can AMD’s latest $200 Radeon muster?
DirectX 12 Testing
Considering the fact that we’ve been hearing about DirectX 12 for what feels like forever, it’s a little surprising that the number of DX12 titles out there remain few. Heck, one such game was Fable Legends, and that was recently shut down. We’re definitely in the middle of a waiting game for more DX12 titles to get here, but thankfully, those that do exist now prove great for testing.
Of all the DirectX 12 games out there, Ashes of the Singularity takes the best advantage of its low-level API capabilities. As a strategy game, there could be an enormous number of AI bots on the screen at once, and in those cases, both the CPU and GPU can be used for computation.
I should be clear about one thing: low-level graphics APIs are designed to benefit low-end hardware better, but when we’re dealing with higher-end, that rules that kind of test useless. For that reason, I’ve chosen to benchmark these two games as normal; the results might not be specific to low-level DX12 enhancements, but they’re still fair for comparisons against other high-end graphics cards.
At this point I am not sure if the RX 480 kicks so much ass because of the DirectX 12 aspect, or because the GTX 960 has just 2GB of memory. Either way, NVIDIA’s follow-up GPU, which is bound to happen given what we’re seeing from the RX 480, is going to make for an interesting comparison in DX 12 tests.
I should note that the VRAM issue is real: normally, I would have included Hitman tests here, but because the GTX 960 only has 2GB of VRAM, the game outright refused me to run it at the settings I needed to. I might be preaching to the choir here: but I can’t believe 2GB was standard not too long ago on mainstream GPUs.
RotTR was a lot easier on the GTX 960 than Ashes was. The RX 480 continues to perform quite well.
This concludes the game tests, so let’s move onto a look at power draw and temperatures, and wrap up with some final thoughts.