Gadgetory

and these are X 480 is available today that's this thing this is the introduction of Polaris at 10 the new GPU architecture from Andy it's available on two models four gigabytes for $200 and eight gigabytes for $240 and the card is being accompanied by the RX 470 and 460 available respectively mid-july for the 470 and end of July for the 460 that's the other important news revealed today for today we're reviewing the RX 488 gigabyte card and before getting to this review all of this coverage is brought to you by Origin PC and their new origin a Kronos small form-factor PC which is customizable upgradable and now shipping with the RX 484 high end that home theater and vr gaming back to the content the RX 4 80 has 36c use and 2304 stream processors it operates at a boosted clock rate of 12 is 66 megahertz and the 8 gigabyte model cards use 8 gigabits per second v round that's gddr5 while the 4 gigabyte cards operate at 7 gigabits per second the table on the screen also shows the RX 470 and RX 460 specs or what we know of them now anyway or have extrapolated and a lot of architecture changes have been made to Polaris 10 the new GPU architecture and that includes a doubling of l2 cache size and the introduction of a heuristic circuit which is used to prefetch instructions and reduce sort of wasted time on underutilized cycles Andy has also updated its geometry processors which now perform additional primitives calling to remove geometry from the pipeline that won't visually impact the scene this is especially useful where AMD might be dealing with tessellation tasks this is done with a primitive discard accelerator which looks for orphaned primitives basically that's not really exactly but they look for primitives that don't have sample points and it's different from the usual Z calling which all Z calling does is it looks at a scene and if it if I've got this card in front of me the Z calling process will look behind the card say ok we're not seeing any geometry right here it's obscured by the card so we're not going to draw the geometry this is different from that this is specifically calling unneeded triangles primitives that would tessellate scenes in ways that might not be perceptible to the user now the block diagram that you've seen drills down into ACU that looks pretty much the same as what we're used to so there are four texture filter units per Cu or compute unit and we end up with 144 TMU is on the arcs 480 there's also a CES you have a couple of those four of those for the RX 480 this architecture has some pretty similar terminology to previous architectures but it's been updated in a lot of ways and if you're curious to learn more about architecture specifically for Polaris 10 hit the link in the description below where we've got the fold pretty big written review and we go into full depth on that now as a quick aside there's also Polaris 11 which is different from 10 it's a lower TDP chip it operates closer to 2 teraflops rather than 5 teraflops and Polaris 11 is meant more for laptops and low-end DGP use like the rx 460 and will be utilized in those low power consumption cases that really only want to focus on getting as much performance as possible out of something that's more similar to low-end chip power draw let's get into the thermal benchmarks first so these thermal charts show the temperature of the RX 4 80 subtracting out ambient that's delta T over a mate's you can read more about how that works in the article links in the description below which also contains some new endurance charts and one of those that will be showing you here includes the fan rpm versus frequency versus temperature but we have some more in the article linked below so let's just dive into this straight away this first chart shows peak average GPU temperatures that the number is averaged at the same point in the over time a graph for every card so we wait until the temperature asymptotes and stabilizes before averaging the output for an equilibrium value the MDR x 480 runs about as warm as the gtx 10a TF e and and these are X 480 cooler lands the chip at 50 6.33 delta T over ambient and that Celsius of course went under load when idle we're seeing temperatures of 7.58 Celsius and the reference GTX 1084 comparison runs at 57 point 5 1 Celsius load and 7.9 6 Celsius Idol both are handily beaten by a IV partner coolers which we won't see for a few weeks for the RX 4 80 but that's sort of how the industry usually works anyway like the GTX 1080 and 1070 the and ER x 480 seems to peak around 80 to 82 Celsius absolute when under the stock auto settings and we'll look at fan rpm versus temperature in a moment along with throttle checks but first we're looking at the thermals overtime chart and this chart possesses the same data as in the chart we just looked at for peak average thermals but represents it against the entire test period the RX 480 is represented in bright yellow the GN hybrid 1080 our DIY project is the lowest temperature on the chart and the dark blue line colliding with the 480 is the GTX 1080 EFI card and now here's the first endurance chart this one shows frequency versus temperatures with a tighter zoom on the frequency left axis as the card hits its peak stock temperature of about 82 Celsius just like we saw with the GTX 1080 the frequency occasionally throttles back to lower temperatures and the range of frequency fluctuation is a little less than 100 megahertz maximally on the RX 480 and even that higher 90 to 100 megahertz range is very uncommon for the most part this does not manifest itself in perceptible FPS changes it's not really chaotic enough to cause any serious issues like we've seen with some overclocking stability tests and it's a big enough change to see a very brief hit 20.1% low frame times but they're infrequent enough that it's pretty easy to overlook this is similar to our conclusion with the GTX 1080s f:e cooler at its stock clock this next chart includes the fan rpm in order to sustain its stock out of box max temperature target of about 80 Celsius the our X 480 fan spins between 1800 and 2200 rpm on average the frequency line is relatively stable as shown at the bottom of this chart and if you're curious to learn more about these tests hit that link in the description below now the next obvious question is how much noise does that 1802 2200 fan rpm range make for the actual user sitting next to the system and we've got some numbers for you here for that the decibel testing out first this decimal test is a total system noise chart so it's not just the noise that this thing makes we've got a noise floor of the power supply and the CLC pump as well to include in there and also we have some subjective comparisons of the volume that this this fan outputs coming up in a video about an hour after this videos publication you'll find that on the channel if you want to hear what this sounds like at 50% hundreds on tidal and auto and so forth and these fan spins at just 780 rpm went under no-load keeping the card in these seven to eight Celsius delta T range while maintaining the 37.3 decibel noise output the auto fan speed finds its resting point in the 2000 to 2,300 rpm range and produces a total system noise of thirty nine point four DB not a huge gain over a thirty seven ish DB noise floor we hit forty two point eight decibels at 50% fan speeds overtaking the 1080 and ten seventy F E which have a 41 point 9 DB output and this is because the Andy fan is now spinning faster since it has a faster rpm total at 5200 maximally 100% fan speed is utterly unbearable at this point the rest of the system noise becomes basically irrelevant because it's all drowned out by the GP blower fan and realistically you'd never want to approach this fan speed anyway you can hear this hen speed in comparison to normal speech and 50% fan speed in our video that's posted after this one but it is pretty loud at the 60 to 65 decibel range depending on what you've got going on in the system alright so enough of the non FPS content now we're gonna move on to frames per second and frame times for all the standard games we test with a couple things here first of all we have power consumption tests on the website in the review hit the link for power consumption analysis and then we've also got more games tested then we're going to be showing here and that's also on the website including Mirror's Edge and a couple of other cool games that we use for our normal analysis of these video cards doom is up first this is an OpenGL game and at Forte doom is unsurprisingly not playable on the RX 480 but it's still worth testing to see the performance at baselines the R X 480 outputs 29.7 fps at 4k ultra in Doom with the 390x operating 4 to 5 fps averages at 1440p the RX 40 runs at 50 6.3 FPS average with tightly timed 43 and 42 FPS 1% and 0.1% lows the RX 480 is 23.6% faster than the gtx 960 for gigabyte card and 33% faster than the r9 380 x the r9 390x is 10.1 percent faster than the RX 480 and the gtx 970 is 17% faster than the RX 480 and videos at new gtx 1070 runs approximately 43% faster than the RX 480 which is pretty massive but it's also twice the price at 1080p the RX 4 80 lands between the 390x at 89 fps and the gtx 960 at 67.7 FBS with the RX 480 at 80 4.7 FPS the GTX 970 runs at 101 fps so that's a speed increase of 16.1% over the 480 and is consistent with the 1440 tests moving on to shadow of mordor at 4k the RX 480 is effectively equivalent to the GTX 970 and the r9 390x is approximately 27% faster than the 480 which is the same for the 1070 it's about the same average FPS output as the 390 X and is therefore also about 27% faster and it's averages at 1440p the our X 480 has a 58 FPS average 35.7 fps 1% low and 31.7 FPS 0.1% low the r9 390x is approximately fourteen point seven percent faster than the 480 at 1440p average FPS values GTA 5 is having some severe stuttering issues occurring on the our X 480 right now and the average 3 past results don't really tell the full story so we're gonna be showing some raw FPS data from our tests after each chart to help illustrate just what the problem is here's the normal 1080p chart the RX 40 operates at 83 FPS average for this test but it's 0.1% low metric takes a serious dive in one of the test passes that we'll show in a second the average frame a technically exceeds the 390x at 7.6 percent faster and 380 X at twenty point five percent faster and is seven percent behind the 970 so we're behind the 970 in this test the playability on the and the RX 480 is hindered by these stutters and framedrops and this is part of why the 970 is a significantly more stable card for GTA 5 at this time here's a look at the three different test sets for this data the first set is 1080p and shows that GTA 5 takes a dive in the third test pass and as we conducted this more it was pretty much the same story this stuttering occurs most frequently during lighting changes and time lapses sunset sunrise things like that at 1440p the RX 40 manages to hold strong at 60fps average but thanks again to a low 0.1% value 5 or 6 fps and 4k is just as bad but it's really not meant to be played on the RX 480 to begin with these stutters are noticeably jarring during gameplay but we talked to Andy's at scott watson about this issue and we're expecting a resolution sometime soon call of duty black ops 3 has historically shown a little bit of advantage towards Andy which is okay because it's one of the best optimized games we have on our bench right now and it helps to balance out some of the results since we have other games like Mordor where there's a swinging 4 and video so it really just depends on what game you're playing and what video card you're using the kind of frame rate you're gonna get at 4k the our X 480 runs 41 FPS average and sits below the 60 FPS mark for this FPS output so the card is outperforming the 970 but that's kind of a moot point because the general unplayable nature of both the 970 and the RX 480 make it such that you'd never plan on 4k anyway moving to 1440p the our X 480 isn't now operating that 83.3 FPS average with tightly time to 1% and 0.1% lows which remain above the 60 FPS threshold and that certainly deserves praise this makes the arcs 480 at 14 point 7 7% faster than the GTX 970 so the to do trade blows here in this game and that does help to nearly tie the 480 with the 980 but again if you look at other games it goes the other way so it really just depends on what you're planning to play with the 480 970 what have you the r9 390x outperforms all these cards with its 94.3 FPS average and the gtx 1070 fe 106.7 FPS which is 28% faster than the RX 480 well put up 1080p briefly and highlight the RX 480 so you can see the performance but the stack is more or less the same and the RX for 80 could probably hit 144 FPS with some settings reductions if you're ok with that if you have a 144 Hertz monitor or something like that but it is exceeding the 120 Hertz range and that's also worth no ashes of singularity is just here for a quick show of dx11 to dx12 scaling on the new polaris architecture at 1080p high we see that the RX 480 is similarly poor-performing in the x11 as its other and the predecessors but it benefits architectural eon dx12 this brings the our X 480 closer to parity with the GTX 980 similar to the black ops test we just looked at but now with a DX 12 spin to it 4k on high it shows similar results with the R X 480 between the 390 X and GTX 980 and the GTX 970 is just below 30fps more interesting though is this frame x chart so this is not an FPS value chart this one shows frame times in milliseconds at 1080p high and we're looking at the average milliseconds between frames on the x-axis the our X 480 sees a massive improvement in DX 12 over DX 11 though is still about even with the GTX 970 in its average frame pacing this is a trend for Andy's architecture as made obvious by this chart and is further illustrated through our percent change graph on the screen now the rx 480 and Polaris 10 architecture benefit nearly 77 percent from dx11 to the X 12 and this is similar to what's seen on last generations r9 390x the fury X looks a bit exaggerated here but that's just mostly because the x11 performance is so plainly dismal that any gain will look massive overclocking on the RX 4 ID has improved it massively over previous generations of Andy's software so previously you've been able to overclock through things like afterburner pretty well but Andy's in-house software was called overdrive and that's dead now it's gone and has been replaced with a tool called wot man wot man allows management of core clock memory clock beat core memory voltage power target and fan speed so it's respectively powerful for OC softer made by a GP vendor and it works well for the most part the only trouble we had was that was when the driver crashed from an unstable overclock which is really not something to be that upset about I do wish that the software would recover from a driver crash but we dealt with it for now just by restarting or logging out here's our stepping table that shows that the RX forties overclocked progression we ultimately drove voltage up to around one point one to five volts power target up to 150% and manually configure the fan speeds to between thirty eight hundred and forty three hundred rpm to dissipate all that heat the resulting frequency was a stable thirteen forty megahertz for the core and we bring that in for two hours successfully and then we have a 2200 megahertz memory clock and that means we've offset memory by 200 Hertz and we've offset the core clock by about 74 megahertz or so here's a look at the clock rate stability chart for that burnin test if you're curious this shows our OC benchmarked at 1440p and Metro last light for a few hours and it's similar to previous and the over clocks in that the core frequency is already so close to its limit that additional OC Headroom is pretty small right now as for fps these charts show some performance gains for the overclock except for in Clarke sensitive games like shadow of mordor we generally see an increase of a couple of frames for the games within the range of 3 to 6 FPS and that creates a 4.8 percent gain in Doom depend on resolution at 7 percent in GTA and 8 percent in Mordor and then there's a 9 to 10 percent gain and Mirror's Edge catalyst the rx 480 is an interesting card it is sort of treated like a flagship product and that it's the first of a new architecture Polaris 10 but it's not the high-end and it's not at a high-end price and to this end the rx 480 is pretty much the start in the end of Polaris the Polaris 10 chip will be in 480 there will be the rx 470 the rx 460 will have Polaris as well but there won't be a big Polaris chip there will be no sort of top high-end RX 4 90 or something running Polaris if such a thing were to exist that will be saved for the next architecture which is Vega Andy has invested heavily into the performance per watt argument with Polaris and that is evident in the move to 14 nanometer FinFET from 28 nanometer planar process previously with the last generation and the RX for 80 as a $240 card trades blows with the GTX 970 Nvidia's last generation card and the 970 can now be had probably at about 250 to 280 dollar price ranges depending on what Mir is and things like that you apply so if you've already got a GTX 970 the RX 480 is an upgrade but if you're considering buying a fire-sale 970 EG at $250 over a 480 we'd actually push you towards the RX for 80 right now the AMD card has 8 gigabytes of vram and in the past that's been a marketing thing that hasn't really mattered that much but the game is changing and these games were benchmarking today especially at higher resolutions like 1440p which this is geared toward the vram does actually matter that's why you see cards like the fury X sometimes falling off charts in 0.1 percent lo metrics where they otherwise should be fine the rx 480 performs pretty well at 1440p you won't be playing 1440p at absolute max settings that's not what this card is for but you will be able to play it fairly reasonably towards the 60 FPS range if you're willing to drop down too high from say ultra and you're kind of average game the RX 480 is not really an exciting architecture it's not bombastic it's not this new top-end flagship and in that way it's it's sort of it's a card that accomplishes its objectives well but those objectives are already being accomplished by things on the market that's not to say that it's less valuable because the RX 480 does bring down the price point for things that can play 1440p and it's forests of course the 970 down in its own price point and the RX for 80 actually is now our go-to recommendation for these 200 ish dollar graphics cards that Nvidia does not have something out today that I would recommend over this except for in very specific cases where you might want CUDA or you might want shadow play the 970 is still a very good card if you have one don't sell it and buy this there's no reason for you to do that if you're trying to buy a new card today and you don't want a 1070 because it's too expensive the two main options I would provide to you are one if 1440p is not something you care about or you don't care about high frequency 1080p gaming then you can look below this card and probably buy something the 150 range and be okay depending on what you want to the second option is if you are willing to wait the gtx 1060 will eventually exist and in such an instance it would be worth comparing the two so there are X 480 overall is an improvement over existing product offerings especially at 1440p gaming I do generally recommend it but I'm going to make one contingency on that recommendation it's the same that we did for the gz x 1080 and 1070 and that is not to buy the reference card unless you really want it for some reason maybe you want a blower fan for a small form-factor case it makes sense in those instances sometimes but if you're building a normal Tower we'll call it I would still recommend waiting for the AIB partner cards those will not be out for a few weeks most likely but a IB partner cards always almost always cool better and that should really be the case for this thing the thermals are acceptable but they are not good and the thermals will be pretty good under something like a dual FEM setup or a larger copper heat sink or a low heat sink and that is something that is important to consider so I would wait for those now that's not to say that those cards will be priced the same as this that's the big question I have and I don't have an answer to is what price will the AIB partner cards that land at and if it's above 240 then maybe this is actually the way to go but if it is at 240 then I think that's probably what I'd be looking at for a card of this specific GPU so I have some plans for the RX 480 yet we'll get there and other than that thanks for watching as always patreon like the postal video if you want to help us out directly subscribe because we do we seriously we have some pretty big plans for this so do subscribe to check this out article in the description below for more information thanks for watching I'll see you all next time