Compute Benchmarks

While it doesn’t play a big role in gaming performance, I do like to also take a look at compute performance on all of the cards that come into the office. This is simply to cover every possible aspect that you might be using a card. In this case, there are three typical uses for a video card outside of gaming. You use it to farm cryptocurrencies, you use it when editing videos and photos, and you might let your PC run folding while it is idle to help research. So I have tested each of these situations using the folding at home benchmark and then CompubenchCL for the other two. Starting with Folding at Home I test both single and double precision. In the single precision benchmark, the extra vRAM seemed to help and edged the MSI up past the two higher clock speed 470’s tested. This ends up being extremely close to both reference RX 480’s as well. In the double precision benchmark, like all of the other AMD cards the 470 8GB jumped up higher in the charts because of Nvidia’s lack of interest in including FP64 performance in their consumer cards. Oddly enough, here both of the higher clock speed 470’s were a little faster.

Next, I ran CompubenchCL but focused on just two results. The video composition benchmark and the bitcoin test. The extra vRAM in the video composition test made a big difference, putting the card up in the middle of the GTX 1060’s. For Bitcoin mining, the MSI pulled a respectable 548.48 MHash per second. This was a little less than the Sapphire but well above the XFX and a good representation of the performance I saw in most of our other tests as well.