AMD Radeon RX 480 4GB versus Radeon RX 480 8GB

By Nathan Kirsch

Fallout 4

Fallout4

Fallout 4 is an open world action role-playing video game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. Fallout 4 is set in a post-apocalyptic Boston in the year 2287, 210 years after a devastating nuclear war, in which the player character emerges from an underground bunker known as a Vault. Gameplay is similar to Fallout 3. The title is the fifth major installment in the Fallout series and was released worldwide on November 10th, 2015.

fallout4 settings

Fallout 4 was benchmarked with ultra image quality settings with TAA and 16x AF. These settings are tough for entry level discrete graphics cards, but are more than playable on high-end gaming graphics cards. V-Sync can’t be disabled in the games options, so we edited the necessary INI files and disabled vsync in the driver software as well. We used FRAPS to benchmark Fallout 4 after you emerge from the vault and are in The Commonwealth.

fallout4-vram

Benchmark Results: In Fallout 4, at 1080p resolution, the RX 480 8GB came in at 84.3 FPS, on average, and that was 4.6% faster than the Radeon RX 480 4GB card running the standard reference clock speed of 7Gbps.

fallout4--2k-vram

Benchmark Results: With the display resolution bumped up to 21601440 we saw a 3% performance gap between the 4GB and 8GB cards. Not a huge difference and running the 4GB card at 8Gbps nearly allowed it to catch up to the 8GB card!

fallout-4k-mem

Benchmark Results: At full 4K UHD resolution the Radeon RX 480 8GB performed 4.7% better than the Radeon RX 480 4GB with 7Gbps memory. We were really shocked that there wasn’t a drop in the minimum frame rate at 4K with the 4GB cards since the dedicated memory was filling up and overflowing to the dynamic memory, but all tests were run three times!