Review: AMD Radeon RX 480 (14nm Polaris)

by Tarinder Sandhu on 29 June 2016, 14:00

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD)

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3DMark

Homepage: futuremark.com | Publisher: Futuremark | Download: Free basic edition

3DMark is the latest version of this hugely-popular synthetic benchmark. Making use of DX11 features such as tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading, it provides modern-day results and is available as a free download.

These results don't come as a surprise if you understand the architecture and market positioning of the RX 480 GPU. It's built to take market share away from the popular GTX 970 and to pre-empt the GTX 1060.

Maybe AMD's marketing machine has heightened expectations too much, maybe people read into the supposed specifications more than usual, but this is a mainstream card at an upper-mainstream price point. GeForce GTX 1070 plays in an entirely different performance and price league.

What's interesting to note is the reference board throttles in this benchmark, oscillating between 1,086MHz and 1,172MHz, due to the temperature hitting 80°C very quickly. Partner boards should score a touch higher.