The AMD Radeon RX 580 & RX 570 Review: A Second Path to Polaris
by Ryan Smith on April 18, 2017 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Polaris
- Radeon RX 500
Grand Theft Auto V
The latest edition of Rockstar’s venerable series of open world action games, Grand Theft Auto V was originally released to the last-gen consoles back in 2013. However thanks to a rather significant facelift for the current-gen consoles and PCs, along with the ability to greatly turn up rendering distances and add other features like MSAA and more realistic shadows, the end result is a game that is still among the most stressful of our benchmarks when all of its features are turned up. Furthermore, in a move rather uncharacteristic of most open world action games, Grand Theft Auto also includes a very comprehensive benchmark mode, giving us a great chance to look into the performance of an open world action game.
On a quick note about settings, as Grand Theft Auto V doesn't have pre-defined settings tiers, I want to quickly note what settings we're using. For "Very High" quality we have all of the primary graphics settings turned up to their highest setting, with the exception of grass, which is at its own very high setting. Meanwhile 4x MSAA is enabled for direct views and reflections. This setting also involves turning on some of the advanced redering features - the game's long shadows, high resolution shadows, and high definition flight streaming - but it not increasing the view distance any further.
Otherwise for "High" quality we take the same basic settings but turn off all MSAA, which significantly reduces the GPU rendering and VRAM requirements.
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ToTTenTranz - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
"If you're looking at these cards, you're likely not going to be buying the newer games. You'll likely be buying humble bundle or bundle star class games for your kids or feed your gaming addiction."I don't even..
paulemannsen - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
You might be on to something there. 1050ti owners probably only play doom 1 or games from CDs found in the trash bin.Icehawk - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Tell that to my friends who buy x60 series of NV cards and tons of new, AAA, titles. They don't have QHD/UHD monitors and for most games the x60s are "enough".Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
Exactly. Lots of people play new games at 1080p and want high quality graphics at 60 fps.Ryan makes the point that in the last year or two not many games have pushed graphics further, especially in FPSs.
Yojimbo - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
I don't think it makes sense to claim Doom is a representation of Vulkan. Add Doom to add Doom, OK, but not because it's a Vulkan game. BTW, that site has the stock clocked Radeon RX 570 outperforming the GTX 1060 FE 6GB in Witcher 3 at 1080p, which seems rather odd. I can't read German, but I don't see where they tell what settings they used to achieve that.milli - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
I can't tell you what settings they've used for that game. But one thing that most people don't take into account is that measured performance on a certain map of a game, doesn't automatically translate into universal/general performance of a card in that game. Often a game will require different performance characteristics just by using a different map. Computerbase seems to be using a heavier map or settings since average frame rates seem to be lower.One other difference is that Anand is testing with a Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz and Computerbase is testing with Intel Core i7-6850K @ 4.3GHz. I'm pretty sure the AMD cards benefit more from the higher single thread performance of the 6850K.
Yojimbo - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Perhaps, but I've seen Witcher 3 benchmarks comparing the 1060 with the 480 and 470 from maybe half a dozen sites and have never seen anything like that before. It's an outlier.HomeworldFound - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
I brought that up with the 1080ti review. I was told that they'll modernise their testing suite at some point.Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
For Vega, I think Ryan said.Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
<reads two comments down> oh.