Synthetic Benchmarks

Being a new launch I took the time to go back through and relook at our benchmarks and change things up. For the synthetic benchmarks, this included adding the new Unigine Superposition benchmark and retesting all of our 3DMark Fire Strike results due to an update last week that caused older results to not be comparable to new results. For all of my retesting, I included a range of Nvidia cards going down to the GTX 1060 6GB using the founder's edition, of course, overclocked cards would be a better comparison though. Then for AMD, I retested using an RX470, the reference RX480, and the Sapphire RX480 Nitro+ for a direct comparison to today's card. As always synthetic benchmarks aren’t going to show you how well your card will perform in game, but they are a solid way to compare between cards so that’s what we are focusing on in this section.

Starting with 3DMark I tested using the Fire Strike benchmark in all three of the settings to test 1080p, 1440p, and 4k resolutions then I followed up with Tim Spy to check out DX12 performance. I wasn’t sure what to expect, even though the RX580 Nitro+ has a nice boost clock compared to the stock RX580 speeds and especially the stock RX480 speeds. The RX480 Nitro+ had a big overclock stock so the jump from 1342MHz to 1411MHz isn’t as large. That said the RX580 Nitro+ did still outperform the 480 Nitro and came in well ahead of the stock RX480 and GTX 1060 Founders Edition. In the two higher resolutions the GTX 1060 gained enough to pass the stock RX480 but the two Nitro cards were still ahead. In Time Spy we had more results to compare against and you can see that the overclocked GTX 1060 came in above the RX480 Nitro but the RX580 Nitro had a big lead still.

So I tested with the new Unigine benchmark and the older Valley Benchmark. In the older one, the RX580 came in 3 FPS ahead of the previous Nitro card, inching closer to the GTX 780 on that test. Valley Benchmark favored Nvidia cards more so the GTX 1060’s were all up higher in the list. For the new Superposition benchmark, I decided to test across four different benchmarks. The two 1080 results are what I want to focus on, the 4k and 8k results were just slipped in for future reference. So here the RX580 Nitro once again outperformed both 480’s but the GTX 1060 Founders Edition performed surprisingly well with a slightly higher score in the 1080p medium benchmark. Both Nitro RX480 and RX580 tests outperformed when it came to the 1080p Extreme benchmark though.

For my last tests, I ran through Catzilla benchmark at 1080p, 1440p, and 4k. Like the Unigine tests, the GTX 1060’s were ahead by a significant amount on all three tests. Beyond that, the RX580 Nitro+ did still pull a good lead out on the RX480 Nitro+ and the XFX RX480 as well.