AMD Radeon RX 480 (8GB) Review (2024)

When reviewing new graphics cards, like AMD's Radeon RX 480 (8GB) ($239.00), the focus of this review, we've started off with the "It's a good time to be a PC gamer!" trope more than a few times in the last several years. But here in the summer of 2016, it's truer than ever. Ever since AMD, way back in 2011, launched the Radeon HD 7970—the first graphics card based on a 28nm manufacturing process—both Nvidia and its graphics-chip rival had been stuck at that same manufacturing process node. So while cards we've seen since then have certainly gotten more powerful (and Nvidia, in particular, has done impressive things with power efficiency), we hadn't seen huge performance gains from one generation to the next in a long time.

For a while, it wasn't an urgent issue. But it has become an increasing problem over the last couple of years. First 4K monitors, then virtual reality, put ever-increasing demands on video cards, to the point where you'd often need one of the highest-end current cards (or a pair of them) to keep the frame rates flowing smoothly with the settings cranked up on the most demanding games.

But that's all changing very quickly. Which is to say: It started changing in mid-May 2016, when Nvidia dropped the performance bomb that is the GeForce GTX 1080 ($549.00 at NVIDIA) .

Thanks to its smaller 16nm manufacturing process (allowing for more transistors and much improved power efficiency), the GTX 1080 performed as much as 80 percent better than the previous-generation GeForce GTX 980 in our benchmark tests. Of course, the GTX 1080 is a rather pricey card ($649 for Nvidia's reference version, dubbed the "Founders Edition"), so the company followed that card in quick succession with a stepped-down GeForce GTX 1070. The GTX 1070 still managed to mostly top the GeForce GTX 980 Ti—a card that launched at $649 not much more than a year ago—and at a more reasonable starting price of $379.

When we wrote this in late June 2016, both of those new Nvidia cards were still tough to find in stock at their MSRPs, and it was unclear whether that was due to seriously pent-up demand, limited yields, or both. But it's impossible to deny the impressive performance jump that Nvidia delivered with its latest architecture ("Pascal") and shrinking the manufacturing process.

Now, it's AMD's turn to do much the same, but at a more enticing price point. The Radeon RX 480 that we're looking at here is the company's opening shot in a new line of mainstream-aimed cards, actually built around a slightly smaller 14nm process. And it comes in at a price point that will raise serious interest from far more gamers than Nvidia's recent offerings.

Equipped with 4GB of memory, the card will have a suggested price of $199, while the 8GB model we tested should sell for about $239. These cards can't deliver the frame rates of the GeForce GTX 1080 or the GTX 1070. But at a fraction of those card's prices, they don't have to do that to be damn impressive.

And the Radeon RX 480 is damn impressive. It's fully capable of delivering the muscle necessary for VR gaming, easily outpacing the GeForce GTX 970, which is the baseline video-card recommendation for the Oculus Rift headset. In fact, in many of our newer benchmark tests, AMD's new card kept pace with or even bested the GeForce GTX 980, a card that, when we wrote this, was still selling at around the $400 mark.

Mind you, with AMD's new card listing for half that, we expect the price of the Nvidia GTX 980 to drop quickly, so long as there's enough stock left of those now previous-generation cards to fulfill orders. But it illustrates how far AMD has come here in one fell swoop. What a difference a year makes.

The Basics: The Radeon RX 480

The Radeon RX 480 is the first AMD card based around the company's new "Polaris" graphics-processor line, built using its own process-node reduction to 14nm using 3D-stacked FinFET transistors. It's not dissimilar to what Nvidia achieved with Pascal. Here's a relative diagram of how the process technology has gotten smaller over the last decade or so, direct from AMD.

The Radeon RX 480 is based around one of two new Polaris chips from AMD, this one dubbed "Polaris 10." There will be a "Polaris 11," as well, but it's a smaller, less-powerful slice of silicon, not a bigger one.

As you might guess, then, AMD has at least a couple of lower-end cards in the works, which are expected to hit the market soon. Details on those forthcoming cards haven't fully been announced yet, but AMD says the one-step-down Radeon RX 470 will be aimed at 1080p gaming, while a Radeon RX 460 is being targeted at e-sports enthusiasts.

We're here, of course, to talk about the Radeon RX 480. Here's a detailed specs list for that card, direct from AMD.

The first thing that stands out about the RX 480's specs, compared to Nvidia's recent cards, is the top clock speed: 1,266MHz. That would have been impressively high a couple years ago, but the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 run at speeds approaching 2GHz, and we were actually able to overclock the latter GPU to just above that mark. That doesn't mean the Radeon RX 480 doesn't perform well. But the card's lower clock speeds are likely the primary reason that AMD isn't expected to launch a card to compete with Nvidia on the high end until its "Vega-class" cards arrive, which are expected sometime in late 2016 or in 2017.

The company is calling its latest Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture in the Radeon RX 480 "4th Generation," which is a bit of a leap given previous versions were designated 1.2, 1.3, and so on. But that's just splitting marketing hairs. AMD also claims that these new parts will deliver a performance-per-watt improvement of up to 2.8 times. That sounds impressive (and it is), but in the fine print of the press presentation we were given, it's made clear that the company is comparing these 400-series parts with AMD's 200-series counterparts on the efficiency front. So those improvements come across not one chip generation, but two if you count the "Fiji" chips in the Fury card line, including the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X"title="ziffcat: 27160, class: zdcse">"title="ziffcat: 27160, class: zdcse">"title="ziffcat: 27160, class: zdcse">"title="ziffcat: 27160, class: zdcse">.

Still, the Radeon RX 480 is rated at 150 watts, which is less than the 165-watt rating of the GeForce GTX 980. But the GeForce GTX 1070 is also rated at 150 watts, and it is a significantly more powerful card, though looking at heat output/power ratings across these companies should be taken as a veryrough comparison at best. Both chip rivals doubtlessly benefit greatly on the efficiency front from the much-reduced process nodes that their latest cards' core silicon now being made on. But to get a real sense of which architecture is more efficient, and to see where that efficiency really matters, we'll have to wait to see what mobile chips both companies release, and the power draws those parts require.

Aesthetically, the Radeon RX 480 isn't quite as flashy as Nvidia's new cards, with its flat sides and pocked plastic surface, compared to the GTX 1070's multi-angled surface that's made mostly of metal. The AMD card also lacks lights to illuminate the Radeon logo on the edge, and there's no protective back plate.

Of course, starting at $199, the Radeon RX 480 is also much more affordable than the $449 Founders Edition of the GeForce GTX 1070 that we tested. So it's understandable that AMD's card isn't as flashy. Those with case windows may miss the lighting, but if that kind of visual flair is what you're after, we're fairly certain that non-reference versions of the Radeon RX 480 will be available with some sort of lighting in the weeks and months after the RX 480's initial launch.

The Radeon RX 480 requires a single six-pin PCI Express power connector, though, as always, aftermarket designs with hopped-up cooling and clock rates may require an eight-pin connector instead.

AMD has definitely made improvements on the port front from its previous-generation high-end Fury cards. The Radeon RX 480's single HDMI port is a 2.0 model, a feature that the Fury cards lacked. HDMI 2.0 allows for 4K resolutions at a 60Hz refresh rate. Given how many low-price 4K HDTVs with HDMI inputs are flooding the market, this is an important addition that catches AMD's card up with Nvidia. (Nvidia had HDMI 2.0 ports in its previous-generation GTX 900-series cards.)

There are no DVI ports here, which will complicate things for those with older monitors. But AMD ditched those ports with its previous-generation Radeon R9 Fury cards, so it's unsurprising that we don't see any here.

The three DisplayPort connectors on the Radeon RX 480 also support High Dynamic Range (HDR) for a wider color gamut and brighter colors, as do Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 cards. This technology is still very much nascent in the real world, especially for gaming and PC monitors. While we've seen demos of HDR and can confirm it's more instantly eye-catching than 4K or stereoscopic 3D, it's tough to say, at least at this point, how much of an impact HDR will have on the gaming space.

It's also worth pointing out that the memory on the RX 480 is of the familiar GDDR5 variety, not the newer High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) found on the company's previous-generation, higher-end Radeon R9 Fury cards, nor the new, faster GDDR5X from Micron that's in the GeForce GTX 1080. The card does feature ample portions of what it has, though: 4GB in the base model, and 8GB in the version we tested. If you plan to stick mostly to 1080p or 1440p gaming, you could probably get by with the lesser allotment. But we'd suggest getting the 8GB version if you have any aspirations of stepping up to gaming at 4K, or if you like to tweak games by downloading optional high-resolution texture packs.

The larger impact of the decision not to go with HBM (which was almost certainly a cost issue) is that the Radeon RX 480 isn't as small of a card as the tiny, HBM-equipped AMD Radeon R9 Nano. The stock version of the Radeon RX 480 is 9.5 inches long. That's still shorter than the 10.5-inch GeForce GTX 1070, but the Radeon RX 480 in its reference-card trim isn't small enough to fit in most Mini-ITX PC cases.

Interestingly, however, when you flip the Radeon RX 480 over, you can see the circuit board itself is much shorter than the actual card body, measuring just 7 inches long. Given that, we wouldn't be surprised to see shorter versions of this card in the months ahead. So, if the stock version of this card is too long for your current case, you may have more options soon.

Software

If it's been a few years since you've owned an AMD graphics card (or your hands-on experience stopped during the days of the ATI brand), it's important to point out that the company has recently undertaken a major overhaul of its software. The functional but slow (and largely text-based) Catalyst Control Center is now gone.

Back in November of 2015, AMD replaced it with Crimson, a more visually appealing and (in most ways) easier-to-navigate application that's also much quicker to launch than the old Catalyst software was.

We won't delve much into Crimson here, as it's now more than a year old. For a much deeper dive on Crimson, please check out this Crimson rundown story from our sibling publication, ExtremeTech. But with the driver revision for the Radeon RX 480, we are seeing one key change with Crimson, around overclocking.

The substantial software addition AMD is launching with the RX 480 is a replacement for the old Overdrive overclocking software, which the company is calling WattMan.

Like Crimson, WattMan is much more visually oriented, with real-time graphs of things like clock speed, temperature, and fan speed. If you have a high-resolution display, it can give you a massive amount of info about your card and its current settings from a single screen.

You will need a 4K monitor to see it all at a glance, though. At lower resolutions, we had to do some scrolling to see all of the graphs and settings. Above, you can see the top-most modules of WattMan; below is what we had to scroll down to see with the resolution at 1080p.

The amount of data on display in WattMan will be appealing to tweakers and overclockers, and it is certainly a solid improvement over AMD's Overdrive software. But we'd like to see a more streamlined "easy" mode for novice users.

And WattMan itself is pretty tough to find if you don't know specifically where to look. It's tucked into the "Global Settings" tab under the "Gaming" section. If you didn't already know that the WattMan tab was meant for overclocking, it wouldn't be abundantly clear by name that this is where overclocking happens. (It sounds more like a power-management utility, if you ask us.)

For details of our actual overclocking results, stay tuned after our main Performance section. After all, we can't tell you how well the card runs when overclocked without delving into its out-of-the-box performance first.

Performance Testing

We are just entering an age of radically new graphics technology, with VR and DirectX 12 (DX12) both coming to the forefront. But, sadly, there aren't any wholly reliable ways to test either quite yet. For VR, there are two major competing headsets, from Oculus and HTC, with more in the pipeline, so it's impossible to say a card will run a given game the same way globally with one benchmark. For DX12, we do have some real-world games to test with, but just a handful at this early stage, instead of an entire suite.

Finally, since DirectX 11 (DX11) is still quite popular, and will remain a mainstream API for several years to come, we're still running plenty of DX11 benchmarks, too. Hopefully, in the future, we'll be able to present comprehensive benchmark charts for DX11, DX12, and VR, but we're just not there yet. Two out of three ain't too shabby, though!

3DMark (Fire Strike)

We started off our testing with Futuremark's 2013 version of 3DMark, specifically the suite's Fire Strike subtest. Fire Strike is a synthetic test designed to measure overall gaming performance, and Futuremark has expanded Fire Strike nowadays into three subtests. In the past, we used the basic test (known simply as "Fire Strike"), as well as the more demanding Fire Strike Extreme test. We've included the latter here, but most of these GPUs are so powerful that we also felt compelled to move up to the most punishing test, Fire Strike Ultra, which is geared toward simulating the stresses of gaming at 4K resolution.

Interestingly, the Radeon RX 480 lagged just behind the overclocked Zotac GeForce GTX 970 Amp Omega Edition ( at Amazon) on the less-demanding Fire Strike Extreme, but edged it out in the 4K Ultra test. As we'll see, this is an interesting precursor to the rest of our testing, where the new AMD card tends to do better on newer, more-demanding tests and game titles.

Also note that a quick glance at the MSI GTX 960 Gaming 2G ($349.00 at Newegg) numbers will give you a look at what $200 worth of graphics card would have bought you just a few weeks before the Radeon RX 480 launch. Looking particularly at the Graphics Subscore, which attempts to isolate card potential, AMD's new card triples the score achieved by MSI's GTX 960 card. We, of course, tested the $239 8GB version of the Radeon RX 480, but we would expect the 4GB $199 model to perform much the same at all but the highest resolutions. Even so: Whoa.

Tomb Raider (2013)

Let's start with some older games in DX11. Here, we fired up the 2013 reboot of the classic title Tomb Raider, testing at the Ultra detail preset and three resolutions.

In our first real-world gaming test, the AMD Radeon RX 480 trailed just slightly behind the overclocked Zotac GTX 970, while doing much better than the MSI GeForce GTX 960, which was until recently priced around $200.

Sleeping Dogs

Next, we rolled out the demanding real-world gaming benchmark test built into the title Sleeping Dogs…

Here once again, the Radeon RX 480 lagged just slightly behind the overclocked Zotac GTX 970, while fully dominating the MSI GTX 960. If you're starting to wonder where the AMD card starts catching up to the GTX 980, stay tuned for our more modern, more-demanding tests.

Bioshock Infinite

The popular title Bioshock Infinite isn't overly demanding, as recent games go, but it's a popular one with stellar good looks. In its built-in benchmark program, we set the graphics level to the highest preset (Ultra+DDOF)…

We've now established a clear trend for the Radeon RX 480 among older DirectX 11 titles, and Bioshock Infinite is no different. The card sticks close, though slightly behind, the GeForce GTX 970 here, while trouncing the GeForce GTX 960. (Our 8GB review card also has four times the memory of the 2GB GeForce GTX 960 charted here, which helped AMD's card at higher resolutions.)

Hitman: Absolution

Next up was Hitman: Absolution, which is an aging game but still pretty hard on a video card.

Once again, in the last of our older DX11 benchmarks, AMD's Radeon RX 480 maintained its status, running mostly behind the overclocked Zotac GTX 970. But thanks, likely, to its 8GB of memory, the RX 480 actually pulled ahead of the GTX 970 at 4K, if only by a nose.

Far Cry Primal

Now here's a much newer game. Ubisoft's latest open-world first-person hunting game is one of the most demanding titles we use, thanks to its lush foliage, detailed shadows, and otherwise incredible environments.

Now that we're stepping into the newer titles, we immediately see things start to change. The AMD Radeon RX 480 managed to finally pull consistently ahead of the GTX 970 here, while getting to within 1 frame per second (fps) of the GeForce GTX 980 at the highest resolution (3,840x2,160, or 4K). Even at 1080p resolution (1,920x1,080), the new AMD card was only 4fps behind the GTX 980, a card that cost close to twice as much when we wrote this.

Ashes of the Singularity

Oxide's Ashes of the Singularity is a bit of a departure as a benchmark, as it's a real-time strategy title, rather than a first-person shooter or a third-person action game. Due to the planet-scale nature of its battle scenes, with hundreds of onscreen tanks, ships, and other implements of future warfare, it can be extremely demanding at high settings.

Also, because of the plethora of rendered units, this game is also more CPU-bound—especially at high settings and resolutions—than most other recent games. We tested it first using DirectX 11 at the "Crazy" preset. (Yes, that's what it's called.)

The results in this chart indicate to us there's a CPU limitation, since the scores are all very close across resolutions with each card. But still, the AMD Radeon RX 480 managed to land just 1fps behind the GTX 980 here at 4K resolution, while the overclocked Zotac GTX 970 managed to edge ahead of the RX 480 at 1080p.

We're going to tease one of our DirectX 12 tests here. When we tested the cards under DX12 using the Crazy preset, the newer AMD card had more of an edge, significantly surpassing the GTX 970, and even outpacing the GTX 980 at all resolutions. After looking less impressive with older titles, it seems like the Radeon RX 480 is establishing its strength in cutting-edge games and APIs. That's exactly what you would hope to find from a new card with new graphics architecture.

Grand Theft Auto V

One of the most popular game franchises on the planet, Grand Theft Auto needs no introduction. The fifth installment took a lot longer than many expected to land on the PC. But when it finally did, in early 2015, it brought with it a number of graphical improvements and tweakable visual settings that pushed the game far beyond its console roots.

The previous $200 performance champ, the GeForce GTX 960 (along with the lesser GTX 950), couldn't even run our GTA V benchmark at our maximum settings. (GTA V keeps you from running the game beyond the capabilities of the card, if you set it too high, rather than letting you run it with poor results.)

The Radeon RX 480 certainly could hack our settings, but it slipped back to its older-game habits here, trailing just slightly behind the Zotac GTX 970, while the GTX 980 had a solid performance lead. Next up, though, we'll be getting back to some newer titles.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Lara Croft rises once again in the early-2016 iteration of Square Enix's long-running action franchise. As our hero works to unfold an ancient mystery (and reveal the secret to immortality) ahead of the ancient and deadly Order of Trinity, she traipses through a slew of complex atmospheric environments, from arid tombs to the frigid Siberian wilderness. A dynamic weather system, and the complexities of Lara's wind-tousled hair, add to the game's visual complexity.

This DirectX 11 test once again shows the AMD Radeon RX 480 just edging out the overclocked GTX 970, and about 1fps behind the GTX 980 at the highest test resolution. Also note that at lower resolutions, the Radeon RX 480 here even managed to best AMD's previous-generation Radeon R9 Fury X, a card that requires liquid cooling and a whole lot more power.

Hitman (2016, Under DX11)

The newest game in the Hitman series finds Agent 47 turning over a new leaf, and embarking on a journey of self-discovery as a teacher at a school for underprivileged children. Just kidding; he kills loads of people in this one, just like the rest. It does offer gorgeous graphics in both DX11 and DX12 varieties, though. We'll tackle the former first.

This title seems to clearly favor AMD cards, as the Radeon RX 480 for the first time significantly outpaced the GTX 980 here, while leaving the overclocked GTX 970 even further behind.

Hitman (2016, Under DX12)

The newest Hitman title also offers up a DX12 graphics option in its benchmark that, like with Rise of the Tomb Raider, looked identical to our eyes to the DX11 version.

The Radeon RX 480 (and AMD cards in general) get an even bigger performance boost here by stepping up to DirectX 12. The GTX 980 lagged well behind the new AMD card, with the Radeon RX 480 even managing to get somewhat close to the performance of the GTX 1070 for the first time. Next up, we'll see if AMD's DirectX 12 advantage carries over to other titles.

Rise of the Tomb Raider (Under DX12)

This sequel to 2013's Tomb Raider was one of the first AAA titles to offer DirectX 12 support. We used the preset labeled "Very High" for testing.

The results here are somewhat mixed, but the Radeon RX 480 doesn't look quite as impressive as it did on the previous test. AMD's new card managed to edge out the overclocked GTX 970 at the higher two resolutions, but it got left behind on that front by the GTX 980. Note: The GTX 980's low showing at 1080p here is likely an anomaly. There's no discernible reason it should fall well behind the GTX 970 and the RX 480 when it easily bested those two cards at higher resolutions.

Ashes of the Singularity (Under DX12)

The strategy title Ashes of the Singularity was among the first to offer DirectX 12 support, even when it was still in beta. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it was also the most stable DX12 test we ran, never once crashing, locking up, or noticeably glitching when we ran it many times on high-end and low-end cards alike.

This was the AMD Radeon RX 480's last chance to shine, and the card certainly did, nearly tripling the score of the GeForce GTX 960 at 1440p (2,560x1,440 resolution), pulling well ahead of the GTX 970, and even besting the GTX 980 at the higher two resolutions.

Clearly, the Radeon RX 480 is a massive performance leap ahead of the frame rates that were available in this price range not long ago. In fact, in our more modern tests, it competes with cards that until recently cost twice as much—and often bests them in these benchmarks.

Acoustics and Overclocking

Before we get to stressing the RX 480 beyond its stock settings, it's important to point out that the Radeon RX 480 is an extremely quiet card as it comes out of the box. Not once did we notice the fan noise over the low whir of our Noctua CPU cooler fan when testing, until we fired up the overclocking software and ramped up the minimum fan speed to make sure the card remained cool at extreme settings.

This is a huge improvement, particularly for those who might be holding on to stock versions of the AMD Radeon R9 290 or R9 290X cards, which were some of the noisiest in recent memory. AMD has clearly made progress on power/heat efficiency. (The same is generally true of Nvidia's latest cards, as well.)

As usual, we were pressed for time with our overclocking testing, and as this is the first time we've used AMD's new WattMan software for overclocking, it's entirely possible that we may have been able to achieve slightly better results given a couple more days. But by increasing the Radeon RX 480's power target by 14 percent and tweaking the temperature target to 84 degrees, we achieved a stable clock-speed increase of 6 percent, upping the top clock speed of the GPU from 1,266MHz to 1,340MHz. Attempting to step up to a 6.5 or 7 percent overclock resulted in lockups when trying to run 3DMark and other tests.

With our 6 percent overclock, our 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra Graphics Subscore jumped from 2,667 to 2,802, about a 5 percent bump. When we shifted to actual game benchmarks, though, we achieved mixed results. Running Far Cry Primal at our overclocked settings, the Ultra preset netted us the same 24fps that we got at stock, despite several retests and reboots. Shifting to the 2016 Hitman reboot, our overclocked card refused to run our 4K test under DirectX 11 and high settings, crashing every time. However, when we shifted to the same test at the same settings under DirectX 12, we achieved an average frame rate of 33.5fps, an extra 1.4fps over the Radeon RX 480's performance at stock settings.

Of course, these game settings push the Radeon RX 480 to its limits, so if you're playing older titles or running at lower settings and resolutions, you may see better results when overclocking. But as a general rule, graphics-card overclocking tends to deliver modest gains at best. We did see a bit more overclocking headroom from the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition sample we tested recently, but that's also a much more powerful card that costs more than three times the starting price of the Radeon RX 480.

Future-Looking Performance Where it Counts

With the next-generation muscle to leave previous cards in the $200 price range far behind, power graphics-intensive VR, and topple the GTX 980 on more than a few cutting-edge titles, it's tough not to be impressed by what AMD has delivered with the Radeon RX 480. For those shopping for a card in this price range, it's a mega-leap over what was available just weeks before we wrote this.

Our only reservation against recommending the Radeon RX 480 wholeheartedly? A competing GeForce GTX 1060 may be arriving soon from Nvidia. As these things often play out, just as we were wrapping up testing on the Radeon RX 480, leaks began appearing online about such a new Nvidia card, and an ostensible photo even showed up at Legit Reviews.

We don't like to make recommendations based solely on rumors, but it seemed obvious even before this happened that Nvidia would launch a GTX 1060 at some point. Now that it seems a release might not be all that far off, those who don't lean strongly to one side of the graphics-card competition or the other may want to wait to see what the Green Team can deliver in this price range.

That being said, the Red Team has thrown down the mainstream-card challenge first, big-time, and Nvidia will have a heck of a time parrying this card. If you're looking for a card that can deliver strong performance for above-1080p gaming, VR, and 4K at reduced settings, the Radeon RX 480 is unquestionably a great value. But if you're likely to stick to 1080p, the upcoming Radeon RX 470 may be a better fit, at a substantially lower price.

With so many new cards arriving in the same season, delivering huge performance leaps over previous-generation parts, the only bad buying decision may fall to those who splurged on a new previous-generation card in the months leading up to these 2016 card launches. Then again, both AMD's Polaris and Nvidia's Pascal have been heavily rumored and teased for months. So, as long as you've been paying attention, you probably didn't make that mistake. Right?