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?
Futuremark 3DMark
I don’t like to overdo “time demos”, but I do love running some hands-off benchmarks that you at home can run as well (provided you have a license) so that you can accurately compare your performance to ours. It goes without saying that any synthetic testing would have to include Futuremark, and in particular for high-end cards, 3DMark’s Fire Strike test.
3DMark includes a number of different game tests, but today’s graphics cards are so powerful, the Fire Strike test is really the only one that makes sense. At 1080p, even modest GPUs can deliver decent performance. A great thing about Fire Strike is that the official tests encompass three different resolutions, including 4K, making it perfect for our testing.
According to 3DMark, our game tests haven’t lied: the RX 480 is quite a bit faster than the 2GB GTX 960, and it doesn’t even fall that far behind the GTX 980.
Unigine Heaven
It’s hard to tell at this point if Heaven is ever going to see a new update, as it’s been quite a while since the last one, but what we have today is still a fantastic benchmark to run. That’s thanks to the fact that it’s free, an also because it can still prove so demanding on today’s highest-end GPUs. It’s also a great test for tessellation performance, as it lets you increase or decrease its intensity. For testing, I stick with ‘Normal’ tessellation.
Yet again, the RX 480 performs quite well in comparison to the R9 Nano – a card that, I must mention again, cost three times as much this past fall. Progress is sometimes amazing.
Catzilla
Meow hear this: there’s a new benchmark in town that promises to be purrfect for testing 4K resolutions. So, that’s just what I’ve used it for. The test consists of a cat innocently roaming a street until chaos ensues. Before long, this feline is mowing down buildings with its laser eyes, destroying GPU performance at the same time.
Interestingly, the RX 480 looks to experience its largest performance delta against the R9 Nano in Catzilla. Did AMD not lace this card with enough catnip? Another angle: just look at the gain the RX 480 has over the 2GB GTX 960! I never thought VRAM would become such a massive issue, but indeed it has.