Compute Benchmarks

Most people wouldn’t consider the RX 460 to be a contender for overall compute performance but I did want to still run it through our tests. Specifically, I'm curious how well it performs in the Bitcoin mining given its low TDP and lack of any power connection. I started first with Folding at Home though to test the single and double precision performance. In the single precision test the RX 460 performed about where I expected it to be, it has about half the performance of the reference RX 480, this is in line with its core count. In the double precision test as expected all of the Nvidia cards drop off here so the RX 460 ends up coming in closer to the GTX 980 than you would ever normally expect. We are a little less than half the performance of the RX 480 here, though.

Next, I tested in CompuBenchCL to take a look at Video Composition performance and then, of course, the Bitcoin test that I’m most curious about. In the Video Composition test, the RX 460 was close in performance to the older GTX 780 and well above half of the RX 480. In the Bitcoin benchmark, the RX 460 pulled 235.05 MHash/s. A few generations back this was an impressive number as shown by the GTX 780 sitting behind it. But this is about 1/3 of the performance of the RX 480. Given the prices, it doesn’t really make the RX 460 a hidden gem, even when taking into account the lower power usage.