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

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 shut down a while ago. 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 GPUs that cost hundreds of dollars, that rules that kind of test useless. For that reason, I’ve chosen to benchmark these three 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.

As with some earlier test results, I hadn’t tested DX12 games on all cards at the same resolution, so for this look, I decided to just test 1080p and 1440p with these three cards. As seen in Unigine, the RX 570 performs on par with the RX 480, while the RX 580 edges ahead a wee bit.

What about Rise Of The Tomb Raider?

In this test, the RX 580 separates itself more from the RX 570, and yet again, the RX 570 performs about the same as the RX 480. What’s interesting about this test result is that unlike the DX11 test, which saw the RX 570 fall seriously short with its minimum framerate, no such issue occurred with the synthetic DX12 test.