[Guru3d] Radeon RX 470 Benchmarks

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redzo

Senior member
Nov 21, 2007
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It's just awful. Fermi -> Perf watt doesn't matter / Perf watt matters! based on team membership. kepler/tahiti -> Perf watt doesn't matter / Perf watt matters! flip flopped based on team, same for hawaii through maxwell. Now all of a sudden the teams have switched yet again. It's just so transparently a load of bull. Pretty sad really. I have maintained, and will continue to maintain that I don't give a single flying buck about power consumption except insofar as it allows higher performance. With the limited exception of mining cards, where perf/watt = profit. Give me price/perf and give me absolute perf.
Agree 100%. Electricity is cheap enough. Perf/$ is king.
It'a about sacrifices. Always has and always will be. People purchasing 390/x were sacrificing efficiency for longevity and performance/$, while 970/80 owners were left with efficiency and brand name.
Forum visitors had to be quite retarded for not not getting this after following a few out of the many threads here. There is enough competent technical crap to make up for all the trolling, flaming, fanboys, etc..
 
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Aug 11, 2008
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It's just awful. Fermi -> Perf watt doesn't matter / Perf watt matters! based on team membership. kepler/tahiti -> Perf watt doesn't matter / Perf watt matters! flip flopped based on team, same for hawaii through maxwell. Now all of a sudden the teams have switched yet again. It's just so transparently a load of bull. Pretty sad really. I have maintained, and will continue to maintain that I don't give a single flying buck about power consumption except insofar as it allows higher performance. With the limited exception of mining cards, where perf/watt = profit. Give me price/perf and give me absolute perf.

Totally agree on the flip/flopping. Performance per watt *does* matter to me though, although it is only one factor. For instance, I have a couple of prebuilt computers with 430 watt or so power supplies. Performance per watt obviously would matter here if it allowed me to get the level of performance I want without changing power supplies. And obviously, if two cards gave the same performance at the same price, it would be silly to choose the one that uses more power. (Obviously this is just a hypothetical situation for the sake of argument.)
 

guachi

Senior member
Nov 16, 2010
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I don't think you can underestimate cards (470 and 480) that succeed across multiple metrics.

These cards appear to be a trifecta of goodness - good/very good performance, excellent perf/w and outstanding perf/$.

I never purchased a 390/390x primarily because the perf/w was so bad, for example. I'll certainly be buying a 480 4gb or 8gb as soon as I can get one and then getting a 3840x2160 monitor. For the types of games I play it will be fine and I can't actually drive a 2160 monitor with my current card. And if I'm finally going to get a card taht *can* drive a 2160 monitor, I want one that ticks all the boxes of performance, perf/w and perf/$.
 

Mopetar

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2011
7,797
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It's mainstream goodness, which applies to the majority of the population, but the crowd here skews heavily towards the high-end enthusiast market. If you're gaming at 1080, the 480 will probably be a great value and get you through the next two years at a minimum.

For anyone gaming on multi-monitor setups or higher resolution displays, Polaris is unlikely to cut it if you want to run games at the highest graphical settings.

Right now there's a giant gap at ~$300 between the 480 and the 1070 that's screaming to be filled. I don't think GP106 will be beefy enough to command that price and I don't expect Vega to fill that void either. I think that right now whichever company clears their last generation high-end stock in that range is the go to option.
 

Armsdealer

Member
May 10, 2016
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At least, the numbers in the op benchmark doesn't show such things...

http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-review,8.html

The 1080 actually draws 182w under load. That's not max tdp, that's actual number under load. The rx480 has amax tdp of 150 watts. They're not the same thing. We don't know exactly how much power it draws under load, but we know it's going to substantially less than 150w. Likewise, for the rx470 - its max draw is 110w. Let's assume that its actual draw under load is 95w (I'm guessing it's probably closer to 80-90, but let's go with it)

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9883/gddr5x-standard-jedec-new-gpu-memory-14-gbps

Gives us a sense of how much power the memory in each card is going to consume.

In the case of the 1080, we are using g5x, which inherently is lower power, but let's just assume an rx470 8gb and gtx1080 use the same power for memory (20w) to be conservative in favor of Pascal. In that case we see (182-20=)162w vs (95-20=)75w remaining.

I'll leave the remaining math as an exercise to the reader while noting that fans use almost no power.. Maybe 5w max

I think at worst amd is neck and neck with nvidia in perf / watt with Polaris
 
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selni

Senior member
Oct 24, 2013
249
0
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TDP is a cooler design spec not maximum power consumption and doesn't mean a lot. While yes all power used will be converted to heat that doesn't mean a 150W TDP card can't use much less if it was overspecced or much more when boosting if temps etc are all ok.

Not bad performance from the looks - we're at titan/290 levels for very affordable cards now. Can't complain.