Synthetic Benchmarks

Before I jump into the in-game testing I do like to run through a few synthetic benchmarks. While they don’t give you an FPS like in-game benchmarks, they do help me compare from card to card consistently. So going in I wanted to see just how the RX 470 Gaming X 8GB would compare to other RX 470’s with less vRAM as well as the 4GB RX 480 that is also in a similar price range. I started my testing off with 3DMark using the Fire Strike benchmark as well as the new Time Spy benchmark for DX12 testing. In Fire Strike using the performance setting the RX 470 Gaming X 8GB falls in between the two other RX 470’s I have tested. The Sapphire 470 has a clock speed of 1260MHz compared to the MSI’s 1242 MHz Gaming Mode so I’m not shocked that it still ended up being a little faster even with the lower vRAM. The XFX 470, on the other hand, had a slightly lower clock speed of 1256MHz that is still higher than the MSI, but it came in lower in the charts. That shows me that the extra vRAM did make a difference, though the extremely high power draw of the Sapphire to keep the clocks stable helped more. In Time Spy I ended up with a similar result as well, with the 470 8GB coming in almost dead even with the GTX 980 Reference card.

In Unigine’s Valley Benchmark the 470 8GB pulled 45.2 FPS but came in a little lower than both of the cards with higher clock speeds. The same happened in Catzilla as well across all three benchmarks. I was a little surprised the extra frame buffer didn’t help in the 4k results, though.

My last test was the SteamVR benchmark. Here the MSI pulled back ahead of the XFX but was still behind the Sapphire. The extra vRAM helped a little more here than the extra clock speed. This kept the RX 470 Gaming X 8GB in the green that shows that it is capable of a good VR experience.