AMD released the AMD Radeon RX 470. A graphics card set to take smooth 1080P gaming at a much lower starting point of 179 USD or 8, 413 PHP.
Don’t quote us on that though since the card is expected to feature variances in terms of pricing especially here in the Philippines. But, we sure do hope that’s the maximum since AMD quoted this card to be a 150 USD 1080P champ earlier this year. The RX 470 is the RX 480’s little brother. Read the review here.
The RX 470 features the AMD Polaris 10 GPU with 2048 stream processors, and 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM. It comes with all the bells and whistles of the Polaris architecture and has a maximum of 4.9 TFLOPs of compute power at just 120W TBP. This card immediately replaces the R7 370 and is set to take the sweet spot of mainstream bracket.
The card features a 926 MHz base clock with a 1206 MHz boost. The 4GB VRAM is supported by a 256-bit bus width which is more than enough for a 4GB card. Now let us check out the benchmarks provided by AMD below.
The tests from AMD labs is courtesy of a system powered by an Intel Core i7 5960X with 16GB of memory running Windows 10. The RX 470 driver is a yet to be released version while the R7 370 uses the 16.15.2211 driver. The card definitely has twice graphics power over the aging R7 370. Now let us check out the RX 470’s performance over 21 titles.
The AMD RX 470 pretty much can handle titles at 1080P with over 60 FPS of performance. Battlefield 4, Project Cars, Witcher 3, and Hitman are definitely one of the hardest hitting titles as far as framerate is concerned. We are glad that this card can handles those titles pretty well. The following settings are used on the benchmarks:
- Rise of the Tomb Raider (High Presets, 4xAF, FXAA), Fallout 4 (Ultra Presets 16xAF)
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (High preset, NV HairWorks: Off, AA ON)
- Metro: Last Light(Very High Preset, 16xAF)
- Total War: Warhammer (Ultra Preset, MLAA, 16xAF)
- Project Cars (Ultra Preset DS2X, 16x AF)
- Alien Isolation (Ultra Preset, SMAA)
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 (Extra/High settings, SMAA, 16x AF)
- Crysis 3 (Very High Preset FXAA)
- Far Cry Primal (High Preset, SMAA)
- Battlefield 4 (Ultra Preset 4xMSAA)
- Civilization: Beyond Earth (Ultra Preset, 8xMSAA)
- Bioshock Infinite (UltraDOF Preset, AA ON, 16xAF)
- Far Cry 4 (Ultra High Preset SMAA)
- Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (Max Preset, 100% SSAA)
- Hitman (Ultra Preset, SMAA, 16xAF)
- Thief (Very High preset, High AA)
- Sniper Elite 3 (Ultra Preset, 2xSSAA, 16xAF)
- Grand Theft Auto V (Ultra Settings, 16xAF)
- Battlefield Hardline (High Settings, High Post-AA)
- Tomb Raider (Ultra Quality, FXAA, 16xAF)
At 179 USD, the price is a little steep. This definitely puts the card under stress from competition specifically the GTX 960 and AMD’s own cards under massive discounts from retailers. While the 150 USD price point is now unlikely to be achieved, AMD’s AIB partners are given the opportunity to do what they want, since the RX 470 wont feature a reference model. Expect non-reference RX 470 cards to hit the market soon.