AMD Radeon RX 480 Graphics Card Review

3D Mark

After all the speculation and commotion about performance, we can finally discuss the benchmarks. In 3DMark, the RX 480 Firestrike numbers are excellent and extremely close to the GTX 970. This is impressive given the early driver version and optimisations to come in the next few months.

During 1440p testing, the GPU managed a better Graphics score than the R9 390 but just fell behind on the general result.

Once the resolution is increased to 4K, the graphics card attains good scores and remains within touching distance of popular products like the GTX 970.

Unigine Valley

Once again, the RX 480 exhibits a major performance boost from the 380X, but it’s a full 8 frames-per-second behind the GTX 970.

Thankfully, the deficit is reduced and the graphics card manages a very solid showing. Of course, it’s some way off the R9 390 which may leave some feeling disappointed.

At higher resolutions, the RX 480 fares better but it’s not really designed to cope with such an extreme preset while pushing so many pixels.

Compute Performance

On a more positive note, the GPU’s OpenCL performance is superb and really close to the R9 390X.