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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just4U - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
yeah.. competes with a 970 on some games.. and the reference 980 on others. Was a good card.akamateau - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
Seriously?2 RX 480 in Crossfire CRUSHES GTX 1080!!!!
rtflol
AntDX316 - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
The hype was fake.I mean honestly releasing a 14nm flagship slower than their previous gen is a step in the wrong direction. I wouldn't be surprised if they just release an $800 version of the 14nm in early 2017 with masssive power. They just need more time to get their fabrications correct. I assume there could be some unforeseen problems and if the problems do arise with the $200 version it won't leak into the common video card world. It would be kept rare and quiet so that stuff can be fixed for their $800 flagship.
slickr - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
This isn't a flagship card you moron! This is a mid range mainstream card, created specifically for the mass market. Their flagship card is coming in 2017, its Vega and its got HBM2, matured 14nm process, 4000+ stream processors, etc...Yojimbo - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
It's not a flagship card. They don't have a new flagship card so they tried to hype their mainstream card with "This is what you really want/need!" The recent trend is for gamers to buy more expensive cards, not cheaper ones, though, so in my opinion unless the economy tanks it's a bad strategy.If it performed 20% better or they sold it for $160 instead of $200 it would be all the things they tried to hype it as being. But as it is, it just looks like the first 14/16nm mainstream card to market. No more, no less. It's a solid card but it'll never be that impressive to launch a mainstream card that slots right into what the competition will offer in 1 or 2 months while leaving the rest of the market uncovered.
Gigaplex - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Next you'll be telling us that the NVIDIA 750 Ti was the Maxwell flagship. It came first, that does not make it a flagship.ihatenividiaastheyareaholes - Saturday, July 9, 2016 - link
heres a thought how about people stop arguaing about this and wake the fuck up to what is going on that being the consoles trying to knock pc of its glorious pedastelIronTed - Wednesday, June 29, 2016 - link
You sir are a moron.slickr - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
The 390 easily beast the gimped and fraudulent 970 3.5GB trash for LESS money. The trash 970 still costs around $300, in extremely rare cases $280 for only 3.5GB.The RX 480 costs $200 or $240, consumes less, has full DX12 support, its cooler, quieter, overclocks a lot more.
sonicmerlin - Friday, July 1, 2016 - link
The reference cards don't overclock at all. If you want an AIB card expect to pay significantly more.