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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fanofanand - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Amazing that you have managed to purchase a card no one has for sale. Not Newegg, not Amazon, go ahead and tell us all where you were able to procure an unreleased card?catavalon21 - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
"2 RX 480s probably beat a single 1070 while consuming twice the power"Actually, very close to double the power in a particular gaming selection (87% more was their assessment)
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2016/07/11/amd_rade...
slickr - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
The only people who care and cared about power consumption, whether its 150W or 170W were/are the paid and bought for shills who write for Nvidia and who commit fraud and scam against their readers, they are committing crimes.Nvidia won because of the shills.
D. Lister - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
You get it man, you've got it all figured out! Yours is the level of comprehension that lesser men like myself strive for all their lives, and still fall short by miles. To hell with trivialities like hardware components, a mind like yours should be tackling questions like "the meaning of life" and whatnot.fanofanand - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
A+ on the hyperbole (is your name an homage to Dean Lister, the MMA fighter?) but his original statement isn't entirely wrong. Few desktop users will notice the difference between 150 watts and 170 watts. I don't know about the tinfoil hat stuff, but the original premise isn't completely invalid.D. Lister - Friday, July 1, 2016 - link
"is your name an homage to Dean Lister, the MMA fighter?"Actually it is an homage to "David 'Dave' Lister", from the "Red Dwarf" books. :)
"Few desktop users will notice the difference between 150 watts and 170 watts. I don't know about the tinfoil hat stuff, but the original premise isn't completely invalid."
The thing is, no one terribly cares for the 480 slightly overshooting the TDP. The thing they're complaining about is AMD's choice to stick on a 6-pin connector on the ref card, instead of an 8-pin one, which forces the card to compensate by over-drawing from its slot. Nonetheless, I was really more concerned about the tinfoil hat stuff.
andrewaggb - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Nah, power consumption is a big deal to some people. I agree that 150W vs 170W is nothing, but pulling an extra 100W or more for the same performance isn't great. It's heat that ends up in the room with you, it's bigger heatsinks or faster fans etc.In laptops power consumption is everything. AMD needs to get it under control, simple as that. I think the RX 480 and 470 will be fine, but if they are already pulling 1070 numbers what will Vega pull? It'll probably use HBM2 and get power savings there, but what about the GPU itself?
jayfang - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Nice, something that makes sense to replace my HD 6850 with.Intel / AMD please step up - still rocking i5-2500K
drgigolo - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Where is the GTX 1080 review? Or 1070 for that matter.cocochanel - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
You didn't read all the comments. It's coming out in a few days.