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AMD Radeon RX 480 in CrossFire: Are two cards faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080?

By Koh Wanzi - 11 Jul 2016

Preview: Are two AMD Radeon RX 480s faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080?

Beating the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (or not)

AMD Radeon RX 480

NVIDIA may be grabbing all the headlines because of its ultra-powerful Pascal cards, but AMD’s story is worth paying attention too as well.

2016 is the year AMD decided to focus on more budget-conscious, mainstream consumers instead of enthusiasts, an area it has consistently been associated with in recent years anyway. To that end, the Radeon RX 480 actually delivers quite well on its promise of providing fairly strong gaming performance to the masses at a more palatable price than usual, and was released to generally positive reviews (save for a few hiccups).

Still, AMD wasn’t shy about making a few bold claims, most notably that two Radeon RX 480s in CrossFire could actually outperform a single GeForce GTX 1080. Essentially, this meant that you could potentially enjoy better performance than the flagship NVIDIA Pascal card at less than US$500 (local pricing is another matter entirely).

Sounds like a pretty good deal, right? Unless of course, the claims don’t exactly pan out in real life. We’ve managed to get our hands on a second Radeon RX 480, and as the following preliminary benchmarks will show, you shouldn’t always believe what companies say.

 

Test Setup

Here's a look at the cards installed in our test bench.

We used the same test rig as we did in our review. The specifications are as follow:

  • Intel Core i7-5960X
  • ASUS X99-Pro (Intel X99 chipset) motherboard
  • 2 x 4GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2133 (Auto timings: CAS 15-15-15-36)
  • Samsung SSD 840 Pro 256GB SATA 6Gbps solid state drive (OS + benchmark + games)
  • Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA 6Gbps hard drive (general storage)
  • Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
  • Intel INF 10.1.1.14

We also ran the cards through a handful of benchmarks and games as follow (strictly speaking, AMD is only claiming that the Radeon RX 480 in CrossFire is faster than the GeForce GTX 1080 in Ashes of the Singularity, but we were unfortunately unable to get the benchmark to work in CrossFire):

  • 3DMark (2013)
  • Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
  • Crysis 3
  • Tom Clancy’s The Division
  • Hitman

The thing with multi-card setups is that there will often be games that aren’t optimized to take advantage of the extra card, so you often have to run them through a wide gamut of games to get an idea of how viable a certain configuration is. With that said, we decided to just go with the above games to provide an inkling of what you can expect (and also to put AMD’s claims to the test).

 

Performance findings

The Radeon RX 480 in CrossFire actually outperformed the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 in 3DMark Fire Strike and Fire Strike Ultra, and came within striking distance of it in Fire Strike Extreme. But given that this is a synthetic benchmark, we actually weren’t surprised to see such a strong result here as cards are generally optimized to perform best in synthetic tests.

When it came to the actual games, performance varied widely depending on the title. For instance, the cards had a good showing in both Shadow of Mordor and Crysis 3. Although there was just a 24 percent increase in the former game at a 2,560 x 1,600-pixel resolution, performance was actually boosted by 70 percent at the higher 3,840 x 2,400-pixel resolution.

As it turns out, the largest benefit is derived at more demanding settings. This was the case in Crysis 3 as well, where there was a 93 percent improvement from just a single Radeon RX 480. However, the two cards in CrossFire still failed to beat the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080, although they did come quite close at the more graphically taxing settings. Having said that, they managed to edge out the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070, a nice feat in and of itself.

Unfortunately, a look at the figures for The Division and Hitman shows why a single powerful card is often favored over multi-GPU setups. Both games displayed negative scaling, where performance was worse than a single Radeon RX 480. The drop was greatest at the less demanding resolutions and settings, and the best case scenario only saw roughly equivalent performance between a single card and the CrossFire setup.

While this is far from a comprehensive survey of CrossFire performance, it’s difficult to make the case that it’s worthwhile going down that route, especially given the markup on the local pricing of the Radeon RX 480. At S$399 for the reference card, two of these would cost you close to S$800, which is more than a single GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition costs here (it is priced at S$768). So while you might eek out better performance than the latter card in certain games, you’re still better off sticking to one GeForce GTX 1070 and avoiding all the issues that dog multi-GPU configurations.

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