Polaris, Boosted: A Look At PowerColor’s Radeon RX 570 & RX 580

Battlefield 4

Thanks to the fact that DICE cares more about PC gaming than most developers, the Battlefield series continues to give us titles that are well-worth benchmarking. While Battlefield 4 is growing a little long in the tooth, it’s still a great test at high resolutions.

Testing: The game’s Singapore level is chosen for testing, as it provides a lot of action that can greatly affect the framerate. The saved game we use starts us off on an airboat that we must steer towards shore, at which point a huge firefight commences. After the accompanying tank gets past a hump in the middle of the beach, the test is stopped.

Right from the get-go, we’re seeing some expected results. The RX 570 is a pinch faster than the 470, and likewise for the 580/480. The RX 470 fell quite short at 1080p compared to the RX 570, although I am not sure why (the results kept in tact after retesting). At 1440p, the 480, 570, and 580 all perform very similarly.

Crysis 3

Like Battlefield 4, Crysis 3 is getting a little up there in years. Fortunately, though, that doesn’t matter, because the game is still more intensive than most current titles. Even though the game came out in 2013, if you’re able to equip Very High settings at your resolution of choice, you’re in a great spot.

Testing: The game’s Red Star Rising level is chosen for benchmarking here, with the lowest difficulty level chosen (dying during a benchmarking run is a little infuriating!) The level starts us out in a broken-down building and leads us down to a river, where we need to activate an alien device. Once this is done, the player is run back underneath a nearby roof, at which point the benchmark ends.

Crysis 3 might be getting up there in years, but at high detail levels, the RX 580 can’t even muster 60 FPS at 1440p, falling 15 frames short. Both the current cards and last-gen’s predecessors handle the game no problem at 1080p.

DOOM

DOOM 3 was released a couple of months before Techgage launched (March 1, 2005, for the record), and it was a game featured in our GPU testing right from the get-go. For this reason, this latest DOOM feels a bit special, even though it follows DOOM 3 up eleven years later. As we hoped, the game proves to be more than suitable for GPU benchmarking.

Testing: Due to time constraints, an ideal level could not be chosen for benchmarking. Instead, our test location starts us off at the bottom of a short set of stairs early on in the game, where we must climb them, open up a door, and then go to a big room where demons are taken care of and the benchmark is stopped.

DOOM not only has great aesthetics, it can run very well on modest hardware. Even the ~$200 RX 570 far exceeds 60 FPS at 1080p. At 1440p, you can expect 50 FPS and higher on any one of the top RX cards.