3DMark Fire Strike
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.
Performance starts off 15 per cent lower than the Sapphire RX 480 Nitro 4GB card. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the RX 480 has more shaders and a touch more memory bandwidth. The second is more telling, as while the Sapphire card locks on to a 1,306MHz boost speed at all times, the Asus RX 470 Strix, at stock speeds and power target, never hits its 1,250MHz core clock.
Our logs show the sample card's core oscillates between 1,150MHz and 1,200MHz during every gaming benchmark. An easy fix for this is to increase the power target to accommodate higher frequencies, but we test in an out-of-the-box configuration.