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
SteamVR
VR benchmarks haven’t been able to keep up with graphics technology. More granular VR benchmark tools promised from Crytek and Basemark haven’t hit the streets yet.
That leaves us with no easy way to quantify the Radeon RX 480’s potential performance increase over the competition except for the SteamVR benchmark. Having said that, this tool is better as a pass/fail test for determining whether your rig can handle VR than it is for making head-to-head GPU comparisons. Here the RX 480 falls—barely—in the test’s green “capable” limits, just behind the EVGA 970 FTW.
3DMark Fire Strike and Fire Strike Ultra
We also tested the RX 480 and its rivals using 3DMark’s highly respected Fire Strike synthetic benchmark, which runs at 1080p.
Next page: Power and heat