The AMD Radeon RX 480 Preview: Polaris Makes Its Mainstream Mark
by Ryan Smith on June 29, 2016 9:00 AM ESTGaming Performance, Continued
While AMD’s launch drivers for the RX 480 have by and large been stable, the one outlier here has been Grand Theft Auto V. In the current drivers there is an issue that appears to affect the game’s built-in benchmark on GCN 1.1 and later cards, causing stuttering, reduced performance, and in the case of the 380X, complete crashes. AMD has told me that they’ve discovered the issue as well and will be issuing a fixed driver, but it was not ready in time for the review.
Continuing our look at gaming performance, it’s becoming increasingly clear that RX 480 trends closely to the last generation Radeon R9 390 and the GeForce GTX 970. Given their architectural similarity, in a lot of ways this is a repeat of 390 vs 970 in general; the two cards are sometimes equal, and sometimes far apart. But in the end, on average, they are close together on our 2016 benchmark suite.
For mainstream video card users, this means that last year’s enthusiast-level performance has come down to mainstream prices.
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Yojimbo - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
What monopoly concerns? It's not illegal to have a monopoly, it's illegal to abuse a monopoly. other than that a monopoly position can affect regulatory rulings concerning mergers and acquisitions, but I doubt NVIDIA has any ambition to make a purchase of a GPU maker, so I doubt they would have any regulatory concerns. The important reason NVIDIA won't try to drive AMD out of the market is because they are interested primarily in increasing their profits and not with driving AMD out of the market. If NVIDIA can get 95% market share and maintain their profit margins they would be very happy, unconcerned with having "too much market share", providing they could achieve it without engaging in uncompetitive practices.cocochanel - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
I never knew Nvidia to be much concerned about monopolies. Over the years, my impression was that they only care about profit margins. And they are good at it.Yojimbo - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Yes the RX 480 may have a cost advantage over the GTX 970, but the point is that AMD doesn't have the market completely to themselves since the RX 480's advantage over the GTX 970 is dubious. NVIDIA may have smaller profit margins in the space but it's not like they are uncompetitive in the space. The GTX 1060 will arrive soon enough to restore NVIDIA's profit margins. In the mean time inventories of the GTX 970 can be flushed out of the system for a profit.Questor - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
"When can we get downvote buttons on AT comments?"I get your point, really I do! Be careful what you ask for. Heaven forbid you should say anything of merit over at TH. The foundations of civilization shake when you question a review(er) and the fanboys rules supreme with their mouse cursor over those little clickable arrows. You can say something that is completely true, accurate, responsible and even polite, but beware should you offend a minion! They and their brethren will pounce upon your words of wit and wisdom with the fury the scorned. Your post, feelings, opinions, facts, questions and whatever else you said, will be buried so deep, not even Hades will be able to dig it up!
JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
You can go back to reddit and enjoy your inner-circle and upboat eachother to make yourselves feel good.Proper internet forums of speech aren't saddled by prominently displaying the most popular opinion. Everyone's post should be equally as worthless.
AntDX316 - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
How do you get a blue post?pashhtk27 - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
"Everyone's post should be equally as worthless."Nice. ;)
ddriver - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
The rx480 is targeted in the market niche that has the best sales to profit margins ratio. It is about as fast as the gtx970, but is more efficient and better performing at new and upcoming games (vulkan, actual dx12 (not dumb ports)). In property optimized games (I mean not games nvidia pays to be left unoptimized for radeons) it is as fast as the r9 nano.I'd say job well done. A very efficient and well targeted launch. It would not be possible to do any better given amd's lack of resources, any higher expectations would be unrealistic and the product of genuine cluelessness or fanboyism.
smilingcrow - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
More efficient by a negligible margin but it is good value; a Radeon Lidl 480. :)sonicmerlin - Friday, July 1, 2016 - link
Really? AMD advertised a 2.8x increase in performance per watt with Polaris. The card massively failed AMD's own expectations.