AMD Radeon RX 470 Review: Polaris Gets Even More Affordable


RX 470 Shadow of Mordor And Thief Performance

Monolith’s surprisingly fun Orc-slaying title Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, delivers a ton of visual fidelity even at the lowest quality settings. So, to maximize the eye-candy on these high-end graphics cards, we ran the game’s Ultra quality benchmark routine at a few resolutions, topping out at 4K -- excuse us, 3840x2160 for the sticklers out there. All of the game's graphics-related options were enabled, along with FXAA and Camera Blur...

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor Performance
Glorious Orc-Slaying Vengeance

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Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

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In order to cover a wide array of GPUs for this review, and not over-load the charts, we've eliminated some cards from the charts at 1080p and 4K. For example, the GeForce GTX 950 and GTX 960 were tested at 1080p and 1440p, but higher-end cards like the R9 390 and GTX 1060 were only tested at 1440P and 4K. The Radeon RX 470 is represented across the board, though.

In the Shadow Of Mordor benchmark, the Radeon RX 470 continue to outrun the R9 380X and GTX 960 / 950, but can't quite catch the GTX 970. 4K performance is surprisingly good, considering AMD is targeting gamers with 1080p displays with this card. Dial the details down a touch and the RX 470 would easily break 30 FPS at 4K in this game.

Thief
DirectX 11 Gaming Performance
Square Enix set the tone for Thief by saying, "Garrett, the Master Thief, steps out of the shadows into the City. In this treacherous place, where the Baron’s Watch spreads a rising tide of fear and oppression, his skills are the only things he can trust. Even the most cautious citizens and their best-guarded possessions are not safe from his reach." The Thief series has been popular for years, not only for its interesting story lines and unique gameplay, but because the games have consistently featured excellent graphics and imagery and leveraged bleeding-edge technology, like AMD's Mantle API, for example.

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Thief

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The performance trend we've seen up to this point continued to play out with Thief. In this game, however, the RX 470 was almost able to catch the GeForce GTX 970 at 1440p, but it actually surpassed the 970 at 4K at the settings we used.


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