In-Game Benchmarks

I was impressed with the Sapphire Nitro in our synthetic benchmarks but it’s the in-game benchmarks I was most curious about. I ran the Nitro RX 470 through 25 different in-game tests. This included 11 games at 2 different resolutions and in a few games I also take a look at both DX 11 and DX 12 performance (don’t worry more are coming soon). The problem is, with so many results it can be a little too much to take in. To help with that I have condensed our results into two graphs, one for 1080p and the other for 1440p. All of our games are run at their max settings and we use the average FPS as the end result. The graphs below are broken down into three FPS ranges to represent unplayable (below 30), playable but not ideal (30 to 60), and ideal (over 60 FPS). So what did I find from those results? Well at 1080p almost every game came in at 60FPS or higher. As always Ashes of the Singularity slowed things down, but all of the single card setups struggle there. The Sapphire RX 470’s results were close to the XFX, but with one more card up over 60 FPS. At 1440p is where I was the most surprised. The Nitro RX 470 actually performed well here. All but three games were playable but 6 games were in the 60+ range. This is amazing compared to the XFX card that only had 2 games in that 60+ section.

The reason for the jump in performance over the XFX in our previous charts was due to a 3-4 FPS improvement almost across the board. This was enough to push a lot of the games from playable into the perfect range at 1440p. The results I saw in the synthetic benchmarks carried over into all of our in-game results. The Sapphire card managed to outperform the XFX in every game. This put the Sapphire RX 470 4Gb up close to the performance of the GTX 980 and the reference RX 470 8GB in a good portion of the games, even 1 or 2 FPS away in a few. I was happy with the RX 470 in my previous review, but with this bump, it gets even more impressive.