AMD’s Polaris Has Landed: A Look At The $200 Radeon RX 480

Since the original The Witcher title came out in 2007, the series has become one of the best RPGs going. Each one of the titles in the series offers deep gameplay, amazing locales, and comprehensive lore. Wild Hunt, the series’ third game, also happens to be one of the best-looking games out there and requires a beefy PC to take great advantage of.

Testing: Our saved game starts us just outside Hierarch Square, where we begin a manual runthrough (literally – the run button is held down as much as possible) through and around the town, to wind up back at a bridge near a watermill (pictured below). The entire runthrough takes about 90 seconds. Please note that while ‘Ultra’ detail is used, NVIDIA’s HairWorks is not.

Wild Hunt is without question one of the most beautiful games ever created, and if you’re planning to play through it on the RX 480 at 1080p, you’re in for a real treat. At that resolution, the GPU managed to keep the minimum framerate at close to 60 FPS. At 1440p, the performance degraded a fair bit, but this game has a ton of dials and switches to fiddle with, so achieving 60 FPS at 1440p won’t be too challenging.

Total War: ATTILA

For strategy fans, the Total War series needs no introduction. ATTILA is the latest in the series, which will remain true for only the next week, as Warhammer is due to launch. Thankfully, any recent Total War game is suitable for benchmarking, and our results are going to prove that.

Testing: ATTILA includes a built-in benchmark, so again, I’ve decided to use that. However, as I do with Metro, I stick to Fraps for framerate capturing as the game’s results page isn’t too convenient.

Helping to wrap up our regular game tests, ATTILA backs up what we’ve seen thus far: the RX 480 is a fierce contender. While it falls well behind the top-half of the chart, the next best current-gen card costs at least twice as much.