AMD Radeon RX 480 Review: Polaris Hitting The Sweet Spot

The latest Hitman title for 2016, once again follows Agent 47, a genetically-enhanced, cold-blooded assassin, who finds himself at the center of new missions scatted about Central Europe, but not before some drama in an ICA training facility some 20 years before the events of 2012's Hitman: Absolution. We tested the game using its DirectX 12 code path, at multiple resolutions, with all in-game options set to their maximum / Ultra values, with FXAA and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled...

Hitman (2016) DirectX 12 Gaming Performance

Hitman (2016)

If we factor DirectX 12 into the equation, the new AMD Radeon RX 480 cards blow the GeForce GTX 970 out of the water according to Hitman.  The newest Polaris-based Radeons still couldn't catch the older Radeon R9 390, but they weren't too far behind.


There were some unfortunate slow downs in this game with the Radeons, however. Though frame pacing is mostly smooth throughout the run, the Radeons exhibited a handful of significant spikes, which degrade the quality of the on-screen animation. The GeForce GTX 970 didn't suffer from the same issues here.

Ashes Of The Singularity DirectX 12 Performance

Oxide's Ashes Of The Singularity offers planetary warfare on a massive scale. The game also includes one of the first DirectX 12 benchmarks. And it's not synthetic like 3DMark’s API overhead feature test, but rather a real-world representation of in-game performance using a variety of workloads. We ran the Ashes benchmark at multiple resolutions with its "crazy" graphics preset and 4X anti-aliasing enabled to put as heavy a workload as possible on the GPUs.

The AMD Radeon RX 480 cards also dominated the GeForce GTX 970 in the Ashes of the Singularity DX12 benchmark. The battle between the 4GB cards was tight, but the 8GB Radeon RX 480 clearly outpaced the GeForce GTX 970.

Details of the Radeon RX 480 8GB card's run through the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark at 2560x1440 are pictured above. As you can see, every test is completely GPU bound.