RX 480 vs GTX 970 With a Full Benchmark Comparison

Ever since the GTX 970 came on the scene back in 2014 it has been an amazing mid-high end GPU for 1080p and light 1440 gaming. Shipping in the fall of 2014 it completely took over the $350 price bracket, potentially stealing a lot of thunder from AMD’s R9 390 card which didn’t ship until nine months later as a direct competitor.

As of May 2016, the GTX 970 is owned by a staggering 5% of Steam users making it the most popular graphics card today. However, AMD has the 970 in its sights with the release of the RX 480 and it ships at an astonishing $199 for the 4GB flavor and $239 for the 8GB version we will be looking at here today.

This effectively makes it very affordable for entry-level PC builders to run games at very high details at 1080p and even 1440p at under $300.

The RX 480 by XFX

While still being a reference card, the XFX version ships with a backplate and a higher boost clock of 1288MHz over the standard 1266MHz. For the purpose of our testing though the card will be overclocked and we will touch on all of that in a moment.

Since this is a reference card from AMD it is using a typical, blower style cooler. The way this works is it pulls air into your card from the case and exhausts it out the back. This can be advantageous under the right system configuration where airflow is an issue since you won’t have excess hot air being dumped back into your chassis.

For the majority of system builders, though, you will see this card running hotter than what will be available from board partners like Sapphire, MSI, Asus and Gigabyte.

I mentioned this card does have a backplate which does not offer any benefit in terms of performance, but it does give the card a nice look and more premium feel in my opinion. It is believed that backplate will help in the reduction of GPU sag over time. Lastly, the backplate protects the PCB so you can feel more confident when handling the card which is always nice.

The GTX 970 SSC by EVGA

The 970 from EVGA here is an aftermarket card and it also ships overclocked,hence the SSC moniker which stands for super super clocked.. No I’m not kidding its actually called super super, so yeah that’s a thing. Despite having a name that sounds like third-grade classroom decided it by committee this card is actually a beast, shipping at 1430MHz boost.

The card also runs quite cool, never going over 70 degrees in all my testing since I’ve owned the card. This design from EVGA also pulls air in, to cool over the GPU, but that air is recycled into the case. This effectively helps the card run cooler, but it can increase temperatures in the rest of your system.

	Sapphire RX 480 4 and 8GB Cards
	MSI RX 480 4GB and 8GB Cards

Overclocking and Temps – GTX 970 vs RX 480

Our GTX 970 was left at its 1430MHz clock which is a good overclock for a GTX 970 and the RX 480 was overclocked manually to 1350MHz using the new Wattman tool by AMD. This gives users an unprecedented amount of driver level access to overclocking the GPU.

Using Wattman, the max stable overclock was 1350MHz on the core and 2200MHz on the memory. This was achieved with custom fan curve topping out at 3100RPM and 50% power delivery increase. I found in my testing that in order for the RX 480 to maintain even its regular boost clock, that increasing the power delivery was essential for the advertised clock speeds.

The AMD RX 480 in my testing topped out at 88C after a one hour endurance test in the Gears of War benchmark. Despite this though, the overclock of 1350MHz never waivered.

Also worth noting is a manual increase of 50% to the power delivery to ensure stable clocks. This is something I would recommend you do even if not overclocking with this particular card in the reference RX 480.

GTX 970 vs RX 480 Benchmarks

All of the testing was done on Windows 10 with the latest drivers available from Nvidia and AMD at the time of writing this article. The CPU in the test system here is an i7 6800K overclocked to 4.3GHz on water with 32GB of DDR4 memory @2666MHz. All of the games were running off a Samsung 850 Evo SSD.

All games here were tested with the highest available settings in the game with no Gameworks or Anti-Aliasing. I find that Gameworks is unfair to include in testing since it heavily favors Nvidia. This same method was done in my review of the 980 Ti vs the GTX 1080.

Conclusion

Looking at the numbers we have here we can see the AMD RX 480 pulling ahead in the majority of the titles test here as well as the Firestrike benchmark which I feel is a great apples to apples comparison to get an idea of how cards can stack up to one another.

I think the biggest take away here is seeing how these cards compared on DirectX 12 in games like Rise of the Tomb Raider, Hitman (2016) and Gears of War.

DX12 is the future for gaming and AMD has a much more considerable lead in these titles which we can contribute to hardware level Asynchronous Compute.

Up until now and even with the recent Pascal line of GPU’s from Nvidia, this is still being done on a software level and it seems this is going to hurt them in low-level API usage, such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan.

Given the price point of the RX 480 8GB version being $239, compared to the 4GB GTX 970 SSC which is now $275 after a price drop, it’s an easy recommendation. Not only because of the price, but also as it’s winning in most titles and exhibits more promise for low-level API functionality, the RX 480 was a clear winner here for me.

If you’re thinking about getting into PC gaming at 1080p or 1440p and you’re on the fence between the RX 480 and 970, get the 480. It can max out pretty much any game at 1080 and even handle 60fps at 1440p on high settings in newer games and even ultra in some instances.

	Sapphire RX 480 4 and 8GB Cards
	MSI RX 480 4GB and 8GB Cards