AMD Radeon RX 480 Video Card Review – Polaris Arrives

Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V, currently one of the hottest PC games, was finally released for the PC on April 14, 2015. Developed by Rockstar, it is set in 2013 and the city of Los Santos. It utilizes the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) which Rockstar has been using since 2006, with multiple updates for technology improvements.

In Grand Theft Auto V we set the game to run with no MSAA with 16x AF and high image quality settings as we didn’t want the GPU to bottleneck the system too bad, but wanted a setup that your average gamer would actually play on. We used the games built-in benchmark utility to have at least one game we used that could be compared to your setup at home. We averaged all the five of the default benchmark runs and omitted both the minimum and maximum values as those results are garbage due to major inconsistencies.

1080P Benchmark Results: The AMD Radeon RX 480 showed that it was a very capable of running high settings at 19201080 in GTA V, averaging 18 FPS faster than the Sapphire R9 380X and only 5 FPS slower than the XFX R9 390 Black Edition OC.

1440P Benchmark Results: Scaling up the resolution to 1440P, the RX 480 gave us an average of 55 FPS and maintained roughly the same gap from the XFX R9 390 Black Edition OC – 7 FPS slower this time.

4K Ultra HD Benchmark Results: GTA V’s built-in benchmark definitely choked the RX 480 at 4K Ultra HD resolution and high settings, giving us 28 FPS on average, but only 4 FPS slower than the XFX R9 390 and only 1 FPS slower than the Zotac GeForce GTX 970.