AMD Radeon RX 480 review: Redefining what's possible with a $200 graphics card
The $200 Radeon RX 480 is the first graphics card built around AMD's 14nm Polaris GPU, and it changes the game.
By Brad Chacos
Senior Editor, PCWorld | PT
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- Meet Polaris and the Radeon RX 480
- Using WattMan for overclocking
- Support for VR, DirectX 12 and Vulkan
- Testing the RX 480 in 6 benchmarks
- RX 480 power draw
- RX 480 heat generation
- Stacking up against Nvidia GPUs
- Radeon RX 480: the bottom line
Hitman
The Radeon RX 480 walks into Hitman with a default advantage, because IO Interactive’s Glacier engine heavily favors AMD hardware.
Programming note: Hitman automatically caps the game’s Texture Quality, Shadow Maps, and Shadow Resolution at medium on cards with 2GB of onboard memory. The EVGA GTX 970 FTW and VisionTek R9 380 were thus tested with those lower graphical settings. I’ve still included them in the graphs below so you can see the comparative DX11 vs. DX12 performance on those cards, but note that their results aren’t a direct apples-to-apples comparison with the others.
Surprise! The Radeon RX 480 solidly outpunches the overclocked EVGA 970 FTW, and it finishes in a dead heat with the overclocked Sapphire R9 390. That lead increases slightly if you use Hitman’s DirectX 12 support, which results in slightly lower average frame rates for GeForce cards, and higher average frame rates for AMD cards—but only if the card has 4GB of memory or more. Frame rates absolutely tank in DX12 with the 2GB cards.
Next page: Rise of the Tomb Raider performance