AMD Radeon RX 480 Video Card Review – Polaris Arrives

Battlefield 4

Battlefield 4 is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) and published by Electronic Arts. It is a sequel to 2011’s Battlefield 3 and was released on October 29, 2013 in North America. Battlefield 4’s single-player Campaign takes place in 2020, six years after the events of its predecessor. Tensions between Russia and the United States have been running at a record high. On top of this, China is also on the brink of war, as Admiral Chang, the main antagonist, plans to overthrow China’s current government; and, if successful, the Russians will have full support from the Chinese, bringing China into a war with the United States.

This game title uses the Frostbite 3 game engine and looks great. We tested Battlefield 4 with the Ultra graphics quality preset as most discrete desktop graphics cards can easily play with this IQ setting at 1080P and we still want to be able to push the higher-end cards down the road. We used FRAPS to benchmark with these settings on the Shanghai level. All tests were done with the DirectX 11 API.

Benchmark Results: At 1080p resolution, the Radeon RX 480 came in at an average frame rate of 83.4, or 8 FPS lower than the Zotac GeForce GTX 970, but 20 FPS faster than the Sapphire R9 380X Nitro.

Benchmark Results: When scaling the resolution up to 2k (21601440), the RX 480 was still very much ahead of the Sapphire R9 380X, showing an average of about 12 FPS better, on average.

Benchmark Results: When it comes to 4k UHD gaming, the RX 480 actually started to catch up to the Zotac GeForce GTX 970 quite a bit, with an average of only 2 FPS slower.