AMD Radeon RX 480 review: A budget card with not-so-budget performance

Note: This article was first published on June 29.

Performance for the masses

We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again. These are some exciting times to be a PC gamer. Following the launch of the Pascal-based NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080 – both of which offered unprecedented levels of performance at their respective price points – AMD announced the Radeon RX 480 at Computex 2016 at a staggeringly value-oriented price of just US$199 for the 4GB version.

More interestingly, AMD made the tantalizing claim that two Radeon RX 480 cards in CrossFire would perform better than a single GeForce GTX 1080. That meant that you could theoretically surpass NVIDIA’s US$699 flagship for less than US$500, which added points in the value department once again (if CrossFire works out well everywhere).

Since then, AMD has completed its Polaris product stack with the announcement of the Radeon RX 460 and 470 at E3, both of which target gamers seeking more value oriented options that can still tackle some level of VR gaming and high performance non-VR performance respectively.

That actually sets quite an interesting tone for AMD overall. Until Vega – AMD’s next-generation performance silicon – launches, it looks like the red camp will not be competing directly with NVIDIA’s high-end Pascal cards. Instead, AMD has set its sights on appealing to the masses, and given the price of the RX 480 and the performance it offers, that may just turn out to be a rather sound decision.

A fourth-generation GCN architecture

The Radeon RX 480 is based on Polaris, which is actually a fourth-generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. While Fiji added features like support for High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), Polaris appears more focused on optimizations like improved geometry processing, enhanced shader efficiency, and more flexible asynchronous compute capabilities.

These efficiency gains have allowed AMD to squeeze extra performance from the GCN architecture, which debuted in its first iteration in 2012. For instance, the enhanced geometry engine now features a new indexed cache that reduces data movement and frees up internal bandwidth resources.

And like Pascal, Polaris also utilizes a more efficient memory and delta color compression engines. Delta color compression, or DCC for short, is a method of increasing the effective memory bandwidth by taking advantage of the fact that whole blocks of pixels often store very similar data. Normally, a GPU would treat individual pixels as if they contained unique and vastly disparate values, but because DCC processes blocks of pixels and stores only a single, precise value (the rest are stored as a delta), it is able to reduce the required bandwidth.

DCC has been in use since GCN 1.2 (or the AMD Radeon R9 285 and later cards), and Polaris now features an updated memory controller that supports up to 8Gbps GDDR5 memory. The overall effect is to extend the viability of GDDR5 memory, a standard that is all too likely going to be phased out in favor of GDDR5X and HBM2 memory in future cards.

And since this is still GCN we’re talking about here, Polaris also has asynchronous compute capabilities, which is the ability to process compute and graphics workloads simultaneously. This includes recently added features like Quick Response Queue, which allows greater flexibility in handling both types of tasks. While GCN might prioritize graphics over compute tasks, Quick Response Queue now enables the GPU to devote more resources to compute tasks if they are more urgent, without stopping the graphics task entirely

Alternatively, compute tasks are also able to preempt graphics workloads, and the GPU is able to divert resources entirely to the former where necessary.

Making VR affordable

The Radeon RX 480 features 36 Compute Units (CUs), for a total of 2,304 stream processors and 144 texture mapping units (TMUs). The number of CUs actually puts it somewhere between the Radeon R9 380 and 390X, but at a much lower price than the latter. Our review unit is the 8GB model that's priced at US$239, which is slightly more expensive than its 4GB counterpart. Here’s a quick snapshot of the card’s specifications:

It is clocked at a 1,266MHz base clock, and boasts up to 5.8 TFLOPS of single-precision floating point performance, which isn’t that far behind the 6.46 and 8.9 TFLOPS the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080 offer respectively, especially when you consider their prices.

The reference design has a fairly short PCB, although the blower-style fan extends beyond that. But because of the vents on the top of the card, it looks like the fan might actually exhaust some heat into the case, and not just out the back of the chassis. The cooling shroud is constructed of plastic, and the dotted grid pattern is reminiscent of the design we saw on cards like the Radeon R9 Fury X.

Round the back, the Radeon RX 480 sports three DisplayPort 1.3/1.4 ports and an HDMI 2.0b connector. These are essentially the latest display standards, so the RX 480 supports things like HDR video and higher resolution displays with higher refresh rates, for instance standard definition 4K video at 120Hz. AMD announced its plans to enable more vibrant and higher fidelity multimedia content earlier this year, and you can read about that in more detail here.

This is also AMD’s first GPU to be based on the new and more efficient 14nm FinFET process, so we can expect power savings as well (more on that in the results section). When it comes to power consumption, the card has a TDP of 150 watts, which means it still requires a 6-pin PCIe connector. That’s pretty low in and of itself, but we can’t help think that it’s actually not that impressive – despite AMD’s emphasis on how efficient Polaris is – because the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 has the same TDP and is so much more powerful. The GeForce GTX 1080 also isn’t that much more power hungry at 180 watts, so AMD isn’t really breaking any new ground in the power consumption department at least.

That aside, the card forms the crux of AMD’s pitch to make VR affordable to a wider audience. The company noted that only the top 16 percent of PC users purchase graphics cards that support VR games and applications, and the overwhelming majority make do with cards in the US$100 to US$300 price range. Normally, those cards wouldn’t be powerful enough to handle the demands of VR gaming – AMD puts the proportion of VR-capable PCs at just 1 percent of the 1.43 billion PCs globally – but that’s exactly what the company wants to change with the RX 480.

In a word, AMD says the card will bring about more affordable and compact VR machines. At a brief demonstration during the PC Gaming Show at E3, CEO Lisa Su even showed off an Alienware VR backpack machine powered by a Radeon RX 480, teasing a possible new wave of small and robust VR-ready systems.

And now for the card’s performance. It’s definitely not in the same class as the GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080, but for its price, there’s really little to complain about.  

Test Setup

The detailed specifications of our current graphics card testbed system is as follows:-

• 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

AMD supplied us with the Crimson Edition 16.6.2 drivers, so that’s what we used for our performance benchmarks. When it came to selecting comparison cards, we went with the Radeon R9 390X and Fury from AMD, and the GeForce GTX 970, 980 and 1080 from NVIDIA. The AMD cards were chosen because the RX 480 appears poised to sit below the R9 390X in terms of performance, and we wanted to see how the top Polaris card compared with the upper-end of AMD’s previous generation air-cooled cards. On NVIDIA’s end, we went with the GeForce GTX 970 and 980 as the RX 480’s performance falls between the two quite often. And because AMD says that two of the Radeon RX 480s in CrossFire can beat a single GeForce GTX 1080, we’ve included that card as well to give a better idea of whether that claim holds water.

The full line-up of graphics cards and their driver versions are listed below:

• AMD Radeon RX 480 (Crimson Edition 16.6.2)
• ASUS Strix Radeon R9 Fury (Crimson Edition 16.3.1)
• ASUS Strix R9 390X (Crimson Edition 16.3.1)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 (ForceWare 368.22)
• MSI GeForce GTX 980 Gaming 8G (ForceWare 365.19)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (ForceWare 368.16)

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Benchmarks

We tested the card with our usual suite of performance benchmarks. Two benchmark games, Hitman and Ashes of the Singularity, also take advantage of DirectX 12, so we were also able to get a look at how the Radeon RX 480 performed using Microsoft’s latest gaming API.

Here’s the list of the benchmarks we used:

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

We used the Fire Strike Extreme test in 3DMark (2013) for our power and temperature tests.

3DMark (2013)

Even though its price might suggest that it is a budget card, the Radeon RX 480 actually managed to hold its own against the other cards, with the exception of the GeForce GTX 1080 of course. As expected, it was slower than the Radeon R9 390X and R9 Fury, but not by any overly large margin. In Fire Strike Extreme for instance, the Radeon RX 480 was only around 7 percent slower than the R9 390X. That's perfectly fine considering the cost of the Radeon R9 390X vs. the new Radeon RX 480.

It was even slightly faster than the GeForce GTX 970. In the same Fire Strike Extreme benchmark, the Radeon RX 480 was around 2 percent faster. That’s not a groundbreaking amount, but it’s impressive given that the street price of the GeForce GTX 970 is still upward of US$260 today.

When it comes to the GeForce GTX 1080, that card is still very much in a category of its own, where the Radeon RX 480 offers only a bit more than half the performance of NVIDIA’s Pascal flagship. The way it looks, AMD will have to perfect the performance scaling with two cards if it wants to outdo the GeForce GTX 1080. We’ll be running an article on CrossFire performance once we get a second card, so we’ll be able to test AMD’s claims for ourselves then.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

Performance results in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor hewed to the same pattern that we observed in 3DMark (2013). Taken alone, the Radeon RX 480 actually does quite admirably for a US$229 card as it manages just over 50fps. Previously, it was often the case that a card in this price range was good for only 1080p gaming.

The Polaris card was again slightly faster than the GeForce GTX 970, although the other AMD cards still had an edge over it. The Radeon R9 390X was a good 18 percent faster at a 1600p resolution, a lead that widened as the tested resolution increased.

Crysis 3

Things were slightly changed in Crysis 3, as the GeForce GTX 970 showed why we’ve long considered it the most bang-for-your-buck card for 1080p gaming. It managed to catch up with the Radeon R9 390X in the least demanding benchmark settings, and it was also quicker than the Radeon RX 480 at all our tested settings.

The performance differential between the Radeon RX 480 and Radeon R9 390X also widened as the graphical settings became more demanding. At 1200p with no anti-aliasing, the Radeon R9 390X was about 10 percent faster, but turning on 8x MSAA increased the difference to 20 percent.

Tom Clancy’s The Division

The Division is one of the newer titles in our benchmark suite, and it was especially interesting to see how AMD’s new card performed in a recently released game. As it turns out, rather well. Again, every statement of praise is qualified with an acknowledgement of how low its price really is, but if you can squeeze out nearly 40fps on 1600p and Ultra settings, that appears to us something to be happy about.

The Radeon RX 480 also beat the GeForce GTX 970 in The Division, although it again fell behind the likes of the Radeon R9 390X and Fury. At the most demanding settings (1600p, Ultra settings), the Radeon R9 390X was about 16 percent faster. The performance was a lot closer at 1080p, and it looks like the card is shaping up to be a supremely attractive option for gamers who don’t need to game at particularly high resolutions. 

Ashes of the Singularity

For a while, AMD’s singular advantage over NVIDIA was GCN’s support for asynchronous compute, which meant that AMD cards often enjoyed performance increases when moving from DirectX 11 to 12, the latter a low-level API that can take advantage of asynchronous compute capabilities.

Ashes of the Singularity is known for its use of asynchronous compute, and the Radeon RX 480 proved that Polaris could benefit from the move to DirectX 12 as well. At 1080p and High settings, switching to DirectX 12 brought about a fairly significant 33 percent improvement.

The Polaris’ card performance relative to everything else also conformed to what we observed in previous benchmarks. It traded blows with the GeForce GTX 970 – the latter held the advantage at the least taxing settings, but the Radeon RX 480 gradually muscled its way to a lead as we cranked the graphics and resolution up. It was also once again behind the Radeon R9 390X and Fury, but if we’re talking about merely pumping out playable frame rates for casual gamers – say, the bare minimum of 20fps – the Radeon RX 480 actually manages to deliver at even the highest settings. What’s more, the RX 480’s performance wasn’t even that far off from the GeForce GTX 980.

Hitman

Hitman is the other DirectX 12 title in our benchmark suite, and thus far, it’s proven itself to be a reasonably trying game to run at a quad HD resolution and Ultra settings. Having said that, the Radeon RX 480 happily put out just over 50fps, well within the playable range. Again, the card demonstrates that it is quite capable of handling 1440p gaming despite its less than premium price.

Even the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 is starting to show its age here, and the Radeon RX 480 handily beats it, coming in at around 41 percent faster at 1600p and Ultra settings in DirectX 12 mode. More interestingly, the Radeon RX 480 actually outstrips the GeForce GTX 980, a rather impressive feat.

Temperature and Power Consumption

All in all, the peak temperature we observed after looping 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme for 15 minutes was in line with expectations. At 70 degrees Celsius, the card was unsurprisingly cooler than certain higher powered cards like the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 and 980. One thing to note is that the GeForce GTX 970 we used is actually a Palit card with the custom JetStream cooler, and is not indicative of the 970 running a lot cooler than the RX 480.

Having said that, the Radeon RX 480 has clearly made some big gains in efficiency. A lot of this is probably due to the move to the 14nm FinFET process, similar to how the Pascal cards are now offering monstrous levels of performance while still reducing power consumption.

Overclocking

We used AMD’s new WattMan overclocking utility that’s built into the version of Radeon Software that was provided to us (at the time of review, other overclocking utilities did not work). After tweaking the settings, which included raising the power limit by 30 percent and bumping up the maximum fan speed, we were able to hit a maximum clock speed of 1,340MHz, and a memory clock of 2,025MHz. That translates into a 6 percent increase over the default speed in WattMan, where you can bump up the frequency in 0.5 percent increments rather than enter a custom value.

In 3DMark, this resulted in a 6 to 8 percent gain across all three Fire Strike benchmarks. It’s not fantastic, but it’s not terrible either. In fact, for such a modest increase in clock speeds, we’d say the gains are actually quite decent. AMD never singled out the card’s overclocking prowess, and it’s difficult to fault a US$229 card for not having a ton of overclocking headroom.

Going after the mass market

After getting a taste of what the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080 offer, some might say that the Radeon RX 480 is considerably less exciting. We wouldn’t even fault you for saying that. Yes, it is less exciting because it doesn’t exactly bust the ceiling in terms of new performance levels, but there’s so much more to the value of a card than just how fast it is.

For one, how well does it satisfy its target audience? We could spend all day obsessing over the latest flagship cards, but the fact remains that the vast majority of gamers and system builders simply don’t want, or don’t see the need, to part with so much money just to get the newest enthusiast-level card. That’s where product differentiation comes in, and it’s also why AMD is explicitly going after the man on the street with its Polaris cards.

AMD’s pitch is quite specific. It wants to make VR gaming affordable and banish the notion that you need an expensive, high-end system to run VR games. In that respect, the RX 480 has succeeded quite well. To put things in perspective, consider that the minimum requirement to run a VR headset like the Oculus Rift is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970. And as we saw in our performance benchmarks, the RX 480 is in fact faster than the 970. Sure, it isn’t faster all the time, but it does come out ahead more frequently, and also has more video RAM and memory bandwidth to cope with the demands of VR games.

The best part is probably the price. At US$199 for the 4GB model and US$239 for the 8GB model, it’s hard to argue against the value that these cards offer. In comparison, the GeForce GTX 970 was priced at US$329 just last year, which means the cost of getting a VR-ready system effectively dropped by US$100 in under a year.

We could even draw some parallels between what NVIDIA did with its Pascal cards and what AMD is doing with the Radeon RX 480. While Pascal delivered ultra-enthusiast performance at more 'mainstream' (sort of) prices, Polaris is bringing VR-ready – also thought of as a high-end pursuit – performance to the budget segment.

The other interesting takeaway is the fact that AMD has seemingly retreated from the high-end market this year. This is actually a move that might work out really well for both the company and consumers. NVIDIA’s Pascal cards are great, and it’s difficult to see AMD topping them this year. So instead of releasing another high-end architecture that only trails behind NVIDIA, AMD decided to play in a different market segment and go after budget-conscious gamers who still need decent performance.

This way, AMD gets to woo buyers without the shadow of NVIDIA looming over it (not too large of a shadow anyway), and consumers get their pick of cards that offer great value. The average gamer doesn’t need a GeForce GTX 1080 (even though everyone probably wants one), but they have every reason to seriously consider the Radeon RX 480.

There's just one downside, the lack of any new features that are readily perceivable by the end user. Polaris' optimizations lie under the hood, but ultimately users just perceive them as an extra dollop of performance. On the other hand, NVIDIA introduced shiny new features like Simultaneous Multi-Projection, GPU Boost 3.0, and even a new in-game photography tool in Ansel. Polaris is not going head-to-head with Pascal, but AMD will need to step up its game with Vega even if Polaris gains traction with consumers, if it wants to compete at the very top again.

Stay tuned as we bring you more updates on the local front on where and how much you can get the Radeon RX 480 and how it differs from the reference model.

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