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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sonicmerlin - Friday, July 1, 2016 - link
Job not well done. Doesn't come close to reaching AMD's advertised 2.8x performance/Watt improvements. The mass market $200 reference board is drawing power over PCIe outside of spec. If Nvidia comes out with an overclockable 1060 for $250 no one is going for the hot and dangerous 480 over the power sipping 1060. And regardless of what some people claim, even 3 GB of VRAM is plenty for 1080p.mickulty - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
>50% performance jump over 380X, I'll take that.sonicmerlin - Friday, July 1, 2016 - link
Even with the benefit of 2 node shrinks?Geranium - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
By your logic 45% to 70% performance improvement over previous generation is F-up? LOL.Geranium - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
wrong reply. It was for first comment.MATHEOS - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
Agreedustwalker13 - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
a massive F-up?only if you compare a 200,- card to a 500,- or 700,- and expect the same performance. this card sits right in the sweet spot of performance and efficiency for a really nice price.
granted it is not for me, but i am one of those crazy people who shell out 500,- or more for a graphics card - this puts me in the top roughly 5% of gamers i would suspect, the rest will buy cards below 300,- and there the 480 delivers extremely well.
no it is not a high-end card, but then it never was supposed to be a 1080 killer.
the interesting question now will be what the 1060 will deliver in terms of price/performance/efficiency.
Byte - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
Ouch AMD can't catch a break. Promised lower power consumption, but seems to be surpassing it, possibly blowing out the PCIE. Performance is about what expected, but won't turn heads. Looks like the GPUs are following CPUs succession in disappointment. Lets hope Vega will be a stunner and nVidia won't have a 1080Ti in time to rain on it like they did with Fury. We need to give AMD a surviving chance!cocochanel - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
With people like you, how could they get a break ?Frenetic Pony - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
And yet they'll make bank off of it. Learned over the past few years that GPU quality and sales have little to do with each other. Nvidia made a ton of money off their last generation despite the fact that no desktop user should give much of a shit about TDP, but it worked anyway despite AMD beating them price for perforrmance in almost every category. Similarly this card sucks while Pascal is quite impressive, but this all the good will and PR in the world so will sell like hotcakes anyway.