AMD Radeon RX 480 Review: Polaris Hitting The Sweet Spot


Steam VR Performance Test, LuxMark v3.1

The Steam VR Performance Test measures a system's performance using a 2-minute sequence from Valve’s Aperture Robot Repair VR demo. After running the test, it determines whether your system is capable of properly running VR content at 90Hz and whether or not the visual fidelity can be increased to the recommended level for a given application. Both a system’s CPU and GPU are factored into the score.

Steam VR Performance Test
DirecX11 VR Performance

steam vr test
Steam VR Performance Test

steam vr

The Radeon RX 480 cards sandwich the GeForce GTX 970 in the Steam VR benchmark. The additional memory on the 8GB RX 480 gives it a marked advantage over the 4GB card in this test, which allows it to overtake the GTX 970 by a small margin. The 4GB Radeon RX 480, however, just misses the mark set by the GTX 970. Note that scores in this range put the RX 480 firmly in the VR Ready category, according to HTC and Valve's requirements.

LuxMark v3.1
OpenCL Benchmark

LuxMark is a cross-platform, Open CL-accelerated 3D rendering benchmark. It's based on the open-source LuxRender physically-based spectral rendering engine, which accurately models the behavior of light and supports high dynamic range. LuxRender also features a number of material types to allow rendering of photo-realistic and artistic scenes. LuxRender is free software, licensed under the GPL, that offers plugins for packages like Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D and 3DS Max. We ran all three of the scenes included with the benchmark using the GPU rendering mode.

luxmark
LuxMark

luxmark

The performance trend we've seen up to this point continued to play out in our Luxmark OpenCL tests. The Radeon RX 480 cards came in a notch behind the Radeon R9 390, but a fair bit ahead of the GeForce GTX 970.


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