Sapphire Nitro+ RX 480 OC 8GB Graphics Card Review

Doom

Just before the embargo, I received a copy of Doom for testing purposes which should be deployed in all future reviews to analyse Vulkan performance. Unfortunately, a byproduct of this is I didn’t have enough time to include all the data and decided to focus on the GTX 980 and review sample. Additionally, the GTX 1060 has now been returned to the manufacturer so doing a direct comparison was impossible. On another note, benchmarking Vulkan games is tricky since it doesn’t support overlay software like MSI Afterburner and FRAPS’ Min/Avg/Max function is rendered useless. Furthermore, Doom doesn’t have an integrated benchmarking tool and performance numbers greatly depend on which section of the game you test. To provide our readers with all the important information, I’d like to clarify that the benchmarking run revolves around an integrated monitoring overlay hidden in Doom’s advanced menu. Since this aspect is viewed in real-time, there is a greater margin of error.

Please note, Doom performance is gauged using multiple 30-second runs during the first two rooms in the game. This seems to work well and the most important thing when benchmarking is to eliminate variables. Also, TSSAA (8TX) is selected to properly enable asynchronous compute. Hopefully, now this has been discussed, you can see how the benchmarking is done and why publications achieve different numbers. Once the Vulkan API was enabled, the Sapphire Nitro+ RX 480 OC enjoyed a monumental performance boost and posted much better numbers than the GTX 980. Bizarrely, the GTX 980’s frame-rate was higher when using OpenGL.

On a similar note, the Sapphire Nitro+ RX 480 OC’s performance is catapulted to another level simply by changing the API from OpenGL to Vulkan. To ensure the GTX 980 fared worse while employing Vulkan. I ran the benchmarks again and again but nothing changed. Clearly, NVIDIA hardware really struggles in this department.

For the first time, the GTX 980 achieves a higher frame-rate when utilising Vulkan. Despite this, it’s only a tiny improvement in the minimum frame-rate and nothing like the gain shown by the Sapphire Nitro+ RX 480 OC.