The release schedule of the AMD Radeon Graphics card has always intrigued us as we get an improved version of the already present card with better performance and less price at least in theory. After the release of the RX 460 with Polaris 11 architecture and 896 stream processors to boost entry level 1080p gaming. Just after a year as expected AMD announced the improved version of the RX 460 with improved hardware and slight tweaks in the “Bonnie” architecture.
The new card is a part of the AMD 500 series, and it is the direct rival of the GTX 1050Ti, just like RX 460 was announced against the GTX 1050. There are two versions of the Radeon RX 560 one has the same number of stream processors as in RX 460 the other one has more stream processors and more texture units. The newer RX 560 is not much of an update since it only has increased the number of stream processors, but it is priced close to the RX 470 that has much better specifications on paper, let’s see if it deserves that price.
Architecture
The Radeon RX 560 is the direct successor of the Radeon RX 460, but both of them share the same Polaris 11 architecture, but this time the passively disabled CUs are now enabled which will enable the Polaris 11 GPU to run on its full potential. All else has been kept the same, the number of the transistors is 3 billion. The 123mm2 die has all of the 16 Compute units given that all of the Compute units are active and there is space to house additional stream processors to make it faster than the RX 460. AMD is saying that the new RX 560’s is 14% faster in rendering high-resolution textures and requires the same power to run it in its full strength.
Specifications
Just like Rx 460, this card is also meant for 1080p gaming but this time around it is not an entry-level card it is meant to ace the 1080p gaming genre not only the esports games. To provide the necessary horsepower AMD changed the GPU structure so that there is enough space for the additional stream processors and texture units, but the total die size remains the same. Even though the manufacturing process remains the same 14nm FinFET from Samsung AMD was able to add more stream processors. There are a total of 1024 stream processors that are spread over 16 CUs with a base clock speed 1175MHz and boost clock speed 1275MHz. The texture units are increased to 64 making the texture filtering rate 81.6 GT/s accompanied by 16 rendering output units which determine the pixel filtering rate that is 20.4Gpix/s. Coming to the memory it comes with the same memory as the RX 460, 4GB of 128-bit GDDR5 memory with 4500MHz clock speed and memory bandwidth 112Gb/s.
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Performance
There are some similarities, and at the same time improvements over the RX 460 as well, this is the picture that we are getting from the specifications sheet. Coming to the performance that this Graphics card provides and see how much performance boost we are getting over the RX 460. Starting with the most demanding game of the PC, Ashes of the singularity the game was unplayable at 1080p high settings at the 1080p low preset it got only 51 frames on average the performance boost was only 5%.
Then we tested the classic first person shooter on the World War from EA the Battlefield 1, at the 1080p medium quality we were getting a decent experience with 64FPS, but the framerate was not constant there were dips into the mid-40s too. Then we tested another first-person shooter from Bethesda studios DOOM, the game requires fast-paced gameplay, at 1080p medium settings the game was running smoothly at an average framerate of 76 while the 1% below result was also above 60.
Finally, we tested the most hardware intensive game of the bunch the Witcher 3 Wild Hunt as the game features a fully loaded open world with no loading screens it requires raw processing power in its full potential. At 1080p medium settings, the game was playable with average framerates of 53; it was only 3% faster than the RX 460.
Conclusion
The Radeon RX 560 does provide performance premium over the RX 460, but it is unable to compete with the GTX 1050Ti as the above picture suggests both have vast performance differences. If we compare the RX 460 with RX 560, there is not much difference regarding performance, but the price gap is huge as the RX 560 demands 50-60 more dollars than the RX 460. If you are looking for a Graphics card at this price range than GTX 1050 would be a better option since it provides performance better than both Graphics cards from AMD.
