Radeon RX 480 Compatibility Mode Benchmarks in Crimson 16.7.1

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: We found no significant difference between the performance of the Radeon RX 480 8GB video card between Crimston 16.6.2 WHQL drivers an the new Crimston 16.7.1 Beta drivers with compatibility mode turned off. Once compatibility mode was enabled we noticed a slight performance decrease.

Benchmark Results: When scaling the resolution up to 2k (21601440) there was no significant difference between any of the drivers and modes tested, which is great news for AMD as they were able to lower the power with compatibility mode and not take a huge performance beating.

Benchmark Results: This isn’t a 4K gaming card, but you can see that turning on compatibility mode had a very small impact on the average FPS performance.