AMD Radeon RX 470 4GB Graphics Card Review

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 few months 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.

We’ve seen up to this point that the RX 470 can hang with the RX 480, but Ashes is our best proof of that yet. Of course, we are talking about a game that’s running at 17 FPS at 1440p, so this isn’t exactly representative of real gameplay.

How about Rise Of The Tomb Raider?

We’re seeing the continuation of a trend here. The RX 470’s performance is quite good, delivering 55 FPS at 1080p – and at high detail. It won’t take much fiddling about to achieve 60 FPS without affecting the game’s gorgeous aesthetic.

Thanks to AMD’s awesome DirectX 12 performance in Hitman, it managed to deliver performance on par with the much more capable GeForce GTX 1060 from NVIDIA. Not bad!

I haven’t figured out the best way to benchmark DOOM and Vulkan yet, so for these quick tests, I simply went through our benchmarking level to the same point each run, and then recorded the stable FPS at that point. In time, I’d like to implement PresentMon for games that don’t have included timedemos.

With Hitman, we saw AMD match NVIDIA’s GTX 1060 with its RX 470; in DOOM, we see it surpass it, thanks to the awesomeness that is Vulkan (and AMD’s obviously good implementation of it).