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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akamateau - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
Hardly!!!2 RX 480 in CROSSFIRE mode outperforms GTX 1080 for $200 less!!
NVidia F-Ked up.
BUY AMERICAN!!
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Only if crossfire workes at 100% which is a big IF, and even then it will be drawing twice the power of a 1080 and putting out way more heat, while barely performing any better.Yeah no thanks.
akamateau - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
Hardly!!!2 RX 480 8gb outperforms GTX 1080 for $200.00 less.
rtflol
BUY AMERICAN!!
WhisperingEye - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Nvidia is an American company. So is AMD. Not that difficult to do if you're in the market for a discreet GPU. You come across as a moron, and like a moron, you'll pass over this criticism and continue whatever quest you're on.Einy0 - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
Yup a massive mess up, $100 less than my GTX 970 for the same performance level. The mainstream price points are where the money is made everyone knows that... They will sell tons of these. The only question is how will the GTX 1060 stack up and what price will it be?fanofanand - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
There is more to an architecture than CU's, GCN 4 brings a few new technologies your 970 don't have.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
You mean stupid high power consumption for a 14nm card and high heat levels? Such amazing features.As far as DX12 and async are concerned, they will not save AMD. AMD needs to stop relying on magic bullets and actually release competitive hardware first.
fanofanand - Friday, July 1, 2016 - link
A couple of % in certain games is "stupid high power consumption"? I see you have tied your livelihood to Nvidia's success but whoa!AbbieHoffman - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
This is a 80 series card! And it is much faster than the 380 it's replacing. Why do you have to explain everything to people nowadays? I swear anyone born after 1987 would have been considered legally retarded in the 1980's! Thank god for fascist political correctness hu? Your minimally exceptional!TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
And it matches a 2 year old 28nm card. How amazing.The 1060 will crush this thing.