In-Game Benchmarks

Now that we have an idea of how the cards stand compared to each other, it’s finally time to get down to the in-game performance numbers. To do that I ran through our entire in-game benchmark test suite. The suite has 13 different games tested at both 1080p and 1440p at their highest settings. Four of the games are also tested in more than one configuration to see the difference between DX11 and DX12 performance or in the case of the most recent addition, DOOM I test out both OpenGL and Vulkan performance. 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 the RX 480 G1 Gaming doesn’t have even one game that comes up unplayable at our extremely high test settings. 13 of the results are over and in most cases WELL over 60 FPS with just a few falling in the 30-60 range. It's impossible to compare our past results to this completely because we have added a few results. But the Sapphire RX 480 had a similar result with 12 and 2. The 1440p results were promising as well. All but one result was playable and 7 of the playable results were in the 60+ range. This was a little less than the Sapphire, but it was a little faster than most RX 480’s due to its high power draw to better avoid slowdowns.

Of course, as always, I also have all of the individual results for everyone to check out as well. When digging through all of the results I was looking for a few different things. For one, I was curious how the G1 Gaming compared to the other RX 480’s and the GTX 1060’s. In most of the tests, the results were similar to what the synthetic benchmarks showed us. The G1 Gaming outperforms the reference design due to its overclock, but the Sapphire 480 still tops the charts for RX 480’s because of its higher clock speed. My Doom results were a little suspect, though, with the G1 Gaming being a touch lower than the reference card on those results. Doom, however, is a little more inconsistent than I would prefer and I suspect that is why I saw this. That said switching to Vulkan mode still gave us the same crazy improvement that I’ve seen with almost all AMD cards showing just how much potential the cards can have with future Vulkan and DX12 titles. The rest of the results show that even with an overclock the GTX 1060’s are faster in the DX11 titles. So it's really a split depending on if you plan on playing more of the current titles and how quickly new DX12 titles will be coming out.