Gadgetory

so last week Amy's first place GPU finally landed the mid-range radiant rx for eighty year and there's been a lot of controversies surrounding the release some that has to do with expectations not quite being met as well as the PCI Express power over drawer Fiasco I'm not going to touch on the over drawing issue in this video well probably at all is this will be corrected by md's board partners and frankly I think the issue has been blown well out of proportion when I reviewed the R X 480 it was found to deliver the best bang for your buck of any GPU in the sub $300 price range although it didn't rewrite the book on value gaming it did manage to edge out even those heavily discounted GTX 970 cards still I couldn't help but feel the arcs forehead he wasn't being shown in the best possible light why some reviewers the 20% more expensive a gigabyte model when it's unlikely to deliver any performance advantage over the 4 gigabyte model this really hurts the cost per frame ratio of the our X 480 and I couldn't understand why AMD would do this as I said in my review I've tested the 4 gigabyte 290 X and a gigabyte 390x clock the clock extensively I found almost no difference between the two under playable conditions so why would the slightly slower R X 480 be any different I don't think it will be and if that's correct it just adds to my confusion surely am deer aware of this and want to show their new GPU off in the best possible light not only paying more for extra memory you can't use but that extra memory is still consuming power hurting the RX 480 is efficiency so my plan then was to get my hands on a pair of 4 gigabyte our X 480 s as soon as possible for lengthy benchmark session sadly everywhere I tried told me there are at least three weeks away from stock of the 4 gigabyte cards nandi themselves didn't have anything on hand either in fact reports are coming in that those who have managed to get their hands on a 4 gigabyte model have actually received an 8 gigabyte card with half the memory disabled in the BIOS this seems odd and it's highly doubtful that AMD will keep delivering 4 gigabyte models that physically have eight gigabytes onboard chances are this was a last-minute decision to get some cheaper 4 gigabyte cards to the market after all AMD touted the RX 480 is a $200 part the good news is rather than having to wait three or more weeks to show you how our X 480 handles just four gigabytes of vram available AMD has provided me with the 4 gigabyte bios this allowed me to flash my 8 gigabyte cards turning them into 4 gigabyte models by disabling half the onboard memory and of course I can flash them back enabling all the memory once I'm done so while I don't have an official 4 gigabyte rx4 ID I can accurately show you how the 4 gigabyte models will perform in both a single card and crossfire configuration it's worth noting that the memory spec for the 4 gigabyte model sees the memory clocked at no less than 17 50 megahertz whereas the 8 gigabyte cards have to be clocked at at least 2000 megahertz AMD cyborg partners can use the faster eight gigabit per second memory on their 4 gigabyte models if they choose and we suspect many custom cards will feature the higher clocked memory therefore we've tested using the 8 gigabyte memory spec on our 4 gigabyte bias as well as usual my standard GPU testing rigor we use and the full specs can be found in the description I'll also be using reference cards clocked at their default specification unless stated otherwise testing will take place at 1440p and 4k so let's go on with it first up we have battlefield 4 at 1440p we see no difference between the 4 gigabyte megabyte models and either a single card or crossfire configuration increasing the resolution to 4k changes nothing again the 4 gigabyte version of the RX 480 is able to deliver the exact same performance seen previously by the APU bike cards Far Cry primal with the HD texture pack enabled didn't see any real difference in the single card comparison enabling crossfire did favor the 8 gigabyte card by 2 fps though we would allow for a 1 2 FPS margin of error now at 4k we find no difference between the 4 gigabyte and 8 gigabyte cards in Far Cry primal Star Wars Battlefront shows the same result seen so far in the previous two games at 1440p upping the resolution to 4k doesn't change anything the 4 gigabyte cards still match the 8 gigabyte models the graphically intense rise of the Tomb Raider also fails to show a difference between the memory capacities even at 4k we see the exact same performance between the RX 4 80 with 4 gigabytes and a gigabytes of memory available the highest possible quality settings aren't being used in Grand Theft Auto 5 as MSAA and the advanced graphical settings are disabled even so we wouldn't expect the 8 gigabyte models have an advantage in this title given what we've seen previously now at 4k the average frame rate of the crossfire cards drops to 60fps this is the same all for the four gigabyte and a gigabyte cards Middle Earth shadow of Mordor is famously known as being a bit of a VRAM Pig and yet we see no difference between their four gigabyte and a gigabyte configurations of the rx 480 at 1440p going to 4k changes nothing again the 4 gigabyte and 8 gigabyte configurations provide the same results overwatch isn't a particularly demanding title so we certainly didn't expect to find a difference here and well we didn't still it is a new and very popular game so I thought it'd be worth including although the average frame rate for the crossfire cards dips below 60 fps of 4k there's still no difference between the 4 gigabyte and Anki gabite configurations here total war Warhammer is a new addition to our benchmarking the games been tested using DirectX 11 as the DirectX 12 mode is still in the beta phase this is another game that's known to eat up memory and get at 1440p we see no performance difference between the 4 gigabyte and a gigabyte our X 480 configurations moving to 4k we find unplayable performance for the most part and despite that the 4 gigabyte cards hang in there Mirror's Edge catalyst is another new title we've included sadly crossfire support doesn't exist yet but we can see that the single card for gigabyte naked bar configurations provided the same 46 FPS of 1440p using the ultra quality preset please no testing was conducted with the GPU memory restriction feature disabled moving to 4k drops the frame rate of the RX 480 for gigabyte 9 gigabyte cards to unplayable levels the eight gigabyte version was 3 FPS faster here but frankly with an average of 23 FPS it doesn't really matter Mirror's Edge catalyst has a hyper quality setting which does turn the game into an insane memory hog hyper cranks are pretty much everything to the next level though truth be told the visual difference between the ultra and hyper settings isn't exactly night and day whereas the performance is most notable of the improved shadows reflections and lighting but again the game doesn't look drastically different and for the most part you'll have a hard time spotting the difference anyway the reason I'm showing the hyper results is because they do show a serious difference between the 4 gigabyte and a gigabyte models here the a gigabyte model with 60% faster which is obviously very significant that said the a key gimmick model is also 30% slower with the hyper quality settings when compared to the ultra performance so I doubt it's worthwhile playing at just 32 FPS to show off that larger memory buffer well there you have it a quick in game comparison comparing the 4 gigabyte an 8 gigabyte rx 480 in both single card and crossfire configurations I've avoided including power consumption results as they could be misleading although 4 gigabytes of the total a gigabyte buffer has been disabled the memory chips are still physically there and could result in higher than expected consumption so for that reason I'll again wait until I have an actual 4 gigabyte card in hand before providing power consumption results so moving on there was really only a single instance where a gigabytes of vram showed any kind of advantage over 4 gigabytes and that was of course Mirror's Edge catalyst using the hyper quality settings sadly the performance was so diminished by this demanding setting that the advantage of the 8 gigabyte card was pretty well null and void that said this could have become a real advantage of crossfire was working this game still for the most part the larger 8 gigabyte memory buffer makes no difference at all even when utilizing 2 cards in crossfire this is honestly what I suspect it would be the case so it makes Amy's choice to send reviewers the more expensive a gigabyte model even more confusing at 240 dollars the RX 480 comes to the cost of $2 96 per frame based on our results had we been sent to $200 for gigabyte model that cost drops to $2 46th and our scatter plot would have looked like this essentially what that means is the arcs 480 would have been by far the best value GPU on the market my conclusion would have been a lot more positive thankfully once I managed to get my hands on a retail 4 gigabyte card from a board partner I should be able to create the radiant our X 480 review that should have been what did you guys think of these results was what you're expecting let me know in the comments I'm your host Matt as always and I'll see you guys next time youtubers like me depend on your support to continue improving the quality and content of our videos to support the channel directly consider becoming a patron to also get access to eve of cool rewards and exclusive giveaways also don't forget you can check prices and buy the products I looked at in this video through the Amazon links in the video description below thank you kindly for supporting me and the hardware on box channel it means a lot to me and I really do appreciate it and in return I'll continue to work as 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