AMD has been trying to make its mark in the silicon market since its inception, both in CPU and GPU department former being overshadowed by Intel and the later is repressed by Nvidia. Most of the GPU market especially all of the mobile GPU markets is owned by Nvidia.
AMD is trying hard to make way for its GPU in the laptop market, while the desktop grade graphics card is facing the problem of more power consumption contrary to the Nvidia’s Graphics cards with the same performance. Although the console market is owned by AMD, they released the 400 series graphics cards that will provide enough performance for the mid-range or low end cheaply build PCs.
AMD Radeon RX 470 is one such card that is based on the 4th generation of AMD’s graphics hardware production. Although the card has been released for quite some time now, it faced shortage issues right at the start of its time due to GPU mining. Then it was mostly overshadowed due to more popular Nvidia GTX 1050Ti that has slightly lesser performance but comparable price. Since we have gotten rid of the mining, and there is not much going in the GPU, we thought that it is the right time to test this card and see this the pinnacle of 1080p gaming at the best price.
Architecture
At heart it is based on the AMD’s Ellesmere process that is ultimately called “Polaris 10”, the silicon wafer is made by 14nm FinFet process made by Samsung in New York that is further packed in Taiwan and then sent to the partner manufacturers as there is no AMD’s in-house RX 470 graphics card.
The 14nm process was better than Nvidia’s 16nm process, but AMD had not revealed their flagship graphics card at the time of release so, there is still no comparison between the manufacturing processes. Both firms take different routes Nvidia starts with its best performance while AMD rolls out its mid-range cards first and then flagships The newer Polaris 10 is 15% more efficient in crunching more transistors making the transistor count 5700 Million on a single 232mm2 die while making it 2.5x more power efficient and at the same giving it a 3x performance boost over the last gen Hawaii process. All in all, the mid-range PCB contains 36 compute units, only 32 of which are enabled in RX 470.
Specifications
The cheaper RX 470 uses the same chip as the RX 480, the chips that did not make it out of the quality assessments of the RX 480 that is the “binned” chips are used to make this graphics card. The stream processors are slightly lesser in count compared to RX 480; these 2048 processors are clocked at slightly lower speed too, making the boost clock speed 1206Mhz.
The TMU count, however, is proportionally lowered to 128, the only component that remains the same is the memory type and bandwidth. The GDDR5 memory clocked at 1605Mhz that is lower than the 2000Mhz memory found in RX 480, while the memory bandwidth is 256-bit making the whole transfer rate 6.6Gbps with the 211GB/s bandwidth, the memory heap comes in 4GB and 8GB configurations.
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Resultantly, AMD has packed enough horsepower in the graphics card to make sure that the GTX 1050Ti bites the dust with the exception of power consumption as it is rated at 120W which requires a 6-pin power connector.
Performance
The graphics card is said to be having the best performance to price ratio in terms of 1080p gaming; it does not only provide best framerates at FHD resolution but also priced closely to the less powered GTX 1050Ti. As always, our test starts with a synthetic benchmark that will set the course of our test and will quench every bit of performance from the graphics card. It scored 10,671 on 3DMark’s Firestrike making it apt for gaming at FHD resolution. Coming to the more plausible gaming benchmarks, that will shape your decision whether this card is still worth buying in 2018.
Assassins creed syndicate is one of the top installments of the Ubisoft’s hit series that has been rather tough for the hardware since its reveal even the heavyweights struggle to tame this game at the highest graphics, this mid-range graphics card is no exception at 1080p ultra settings the game was playable with framerates maxing at 37. On the other hand, Batman Arkham Knight the game that had the worst PC port was very good with this after the latest patch we were able to get more than 100 FPS on average at 1080p.
Verdict
AMD Radeon has been overshadowed by Nvidia for a very long time, but the mid-range department always has a one to one competition between both firms. AMD’s RX 470 is the card that can take the market away from the GTX 1050 SKUs, but the ambiguous pricing from AMD has made the consumers oblivious of the performance that RX 470 puts on the table and this review answers that.
