Introduction
Now that all of the first-week launch hoopla surrounding AMD's release of the Radeon RX 480 is over, I can finally do some interesting articles on the hardware I have sitting in my GPU labs. The first of which is this article, which will take a look at two AMD Radeon RX 480s in CrossFire.
AMD showed off Radeon RX 480 CrossFire in a few of its briefings before the RX 480 launch, comparing it against NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 1080 in only a single game; Ashes of the Singularity. AoTS just so happens to be a title that runs better on AMD hardware, and with the tease of the RX 480 CF setup beating the beastly GTX 1080, I had to test it for myself.
Well, now we're here - and we have two RX 480s on-hand for some CrossFire testing.
Setting Expectations
Setting your expectations too high, and you'll be disappointed - set them too low, and you won't have enough buzz around your product. This is a rule set to follow, and AMD has been walking a fine line between the two.
AMD didn't really push the multi-GPU angle of the Radeon RX 480, and that could be for a few reasons. If AMD had come out and pushed the RX 480 in CrossFire, it would have to have rock solid drivers - and it would also have to test games where CrossFire is not only supported, but it excels. Well, I like to be difficult - so I kept to the same benchmark suite I use in my video card reviews.
A few of them don't have CrossFire support, so I've left them out, but I made sure to include Ashes of the Singularity as I wanted to see what type of performance I was going to get on my setup. You'll have to check the next few pages for benchmark results, but we have to establish a few things first.
One single Radeon RX 480 is a damn powerful card for the money, with the 4GB version costing $199 while the 8GB version is $40 more at $239. Two of the RX 480 8GB cards in CF will set you back $478 - which is about the cost of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1070.
This means in synthetic benchmarks where we get close to, if not 100% scaling, the RX 480 CrossFire setup should at least keep up with, but more often beat the GTX 1070. But what about the GTX 1080? Well, that's where things get interesting.
