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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Drumsticks - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
I have heard this is true, but what does Anandtech (and many others) measure by? Most reviews show the 480 and the 970 very close in power draw.Polaris definitely appears to be a little bit more efficient than Maxwell, but likely less a good bit less efficient than Pascal. It's definitely better than the 3XX vs Maxwell days though.
looncraz - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
Compared to the 970, the RX 480 has better power consumption for the performance, yes. Not by much, but that value should increase with AIB versions as the reference runs rather warm and has a less than efficient VRM.Only time will tell how that consumption changes with clock speeds and how much overclocking can be genuinely achieved from the chip, but at this point, stock vs stock, the RX480 is a better buy than the 970.
The 1060 is another matter altogether. It will certainly use less power and clock better than the RX 480, so we can assume that it will perform better as well - with nVidia simply tweaking its default clocks to best the RX 480. Still, it looks like the 1060 will have only 3GB or 6GB of RAM, so the cheaper RX 480 will fair better in RAM-heavy scenarios than the cheaper 1060.
just4U - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
There is no guarantees on the 1060.. especially if it's 128bit. The 960 was a little on the disappointing side. Especially considering what you had to pay for it. (I know.. I own a 960 4G and a 380..)fanofanand - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
I wouldn't know how disappointing the 960 was, seeing as Anandtech never thought it worthy of review. *zing*gnawrot - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
I am pretty sure that AMD can deliver Vega in 2017 if they want to. In the mean time they will release their server CPUs (more profitable market). They cannot launch that many products at the same time.Michael Bay - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
Their server CPUs which nobody even wants. This particular battle was lost a decade ago.Domaldel - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Not really if what we've heard about Zen is correct.32 cores and 64 threads with each core roughly matching Broadwell clock for clock at a lower price point?
While all of that could of course be bull there's also potential here for some serious disruption in the CPU market.
And Zen is probably higher priority for AMD then the GPU market as a whole.
Gigaplex - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
I doubt they'll match Broadwell clock for clock. They'll probably fall in the Nehalem to Sandy Bridge range. That should be enough though to cause some disruption in the CPU market if the price is right.mikato - Friday, July 29, 2016 - link
So are you saying, Michael Bay, that if they released a CPU that was competitive or better price-performance-efficiency and Intel's then it wouldn't be successful? It sounds like that is what you are saying.r@ven - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
What are you stupid? The R9 390 was already made in the time to compete the 970. And even faster in 1440P.