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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catavalon21 - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
The review HardOCP did on the 480 in CF mode against the 1080 and 1070 suggests YOUR statement missed the mark...if only I could type, or proofread, or something.AbbieHoffman - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
Well! I was going to buy the RX 480 to replace my GTX 970, But it looks like there is no point! I really thought the 480X was going to perform better than the 980.Meteor2 - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
If you want to replace your 970 you're going to have buy a 1070.Laststop311 - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Hopefully this brings price of 1070 down to 299.99 for the custom ones.vladx - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Good luck with thatamitp05 - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
AMD need to push performance UP by 15% and power consumption DOWN 15%. To make this card truly tempting and to match the hype they created.But I'll still buy AMD. We need them :(
AMD: Please don't Hype Zen too much. It feels bad when expectation you created are not met.
AntDX316 - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
If you want to support AMD just get XB2 and PS5.D. Lister - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Nah, last time my GPU died, I spent several months on a crappy IGPU. AMD, or ANY company for that matter, didn't come for my support. Then why should I support any of them?GPU2016follower - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
I don't even know why I come here maybe just by curiosity but I don't trust anandtech and their biased reviews always in favor of Nvidia cards. In the majority of other websites' reviwers just to name few: Techspot, Forbes, Polygon, arstechnica, PCgamer, ... the RX 480 easily dominates the GTX 970 in 95 % gaming benchmarks by an average from 5 and up to 10fps and the RX 480 manages in very few cases to trail the GTX 980 by only 2 or 3 fps below.I think I will wait for the custom versions to see if they can offer better performance, maybe we will see the Sapphire, ASUS, XFX RX 480 beefed with their more powerful OC versions to compete against the GTX 980.
AntDX316 - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
The microstutter is way higher than nvidias offerings..Unfortunately certain things aren't made common like adaptive vsync/gsync, micro stutter, frame draw response time. FPS is what most of the gamers look for and soley chase. I believe because they are too busy thinking about what they were taught before and/or too busy with whatever else they are doing in life other than keeping up-to-date of what does matter for the best gaming experience and why. It took a while for people to move away from the you can only see 24/30 fps and no more.