MSI Radeon RX 470 Gaming X 4 GB Review

Polaris is AMD's first architecture manufactured in a 14 nm FinFET process. It is the 4th generation GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture and offers the following improvements according to AMD:

• Enhanced geometry engines
• Improved shader efficiency (up to 15% per CU at RX 480 vs. R9 290)
• LiquidVR API support with "Variable Resolution Rendering"
• Improved memory controller and Delta Color Compression (DCC) with full 2/4/8:1 support
• Doubled Level 2 cache
• Shader Instruction Pre-Fetch and improved buffering
• Improved Asynchronous Compute
• AMD TrueAudio Next (calculated via shader)
• H.265 Main 10 decode and 4K60 HEVC encode
• HDMI 2.0b, DisplayPort 1.3 HBR (5K60 with a single cable) / 1.4 HDR with HDCP 2.2
• HDR display support

These improvements are supposed to increase the performance by up to a factor of 2.8x (RX 470 vs. R9 270X) per watt.

Our test system for the following benchmarks consists of the following components:

Intel Core i7-4790K (not overclocked), 16 GB DDR3, Asus ZU97-Deluxe, Asus PB287Q 4K monitor, Intel SSD 530 (240 GB, system), OCZ Trion 100 SSD (480 GB, benchmarks), Windows 10 64-bit with all updates as of mid-June. As a driver we used the pre-launch driver 16.8.1, which was made available to the press ahead of the launch.

We start our performance evaluation with a look at the synthetic benchmarks from Futuremark and Unigine. Depending on the test, the Radeon RX 470 is between 1 and 10% behind the Radeon RX 480 and is therefore even closer to the larger sibling than the specifications might suggest. This should be a result of the slightly higher clocks of our RX 470 custom model, but the Polaris architecture has also benefited from some driver optimizations since the launch of the RX 480. The difference between the two chips should generally be in the double digit range.

Our comparison shows that the RX 470 can compete with the popular Maxwell GPU GeForce GTX 970 and even clearly beat it in 3DMark 11. Unigine Heaven and Valley on the other hand show an advantage in favor of the Nvidia model; so generally, they are pretty much on par. The current GeForce GTX 1060 is 16% faster than the RX 470, but is also significantly more expensive.

The RX 470 falls slightly behind the Nvidia competition in our gaming benchmarks, but the performance is still impressive when you consider the price. Our overclocked MSI model is just behind the older, but much more power-hungry Radeon R9 290X as well as the GeForce GTX 970, and is less than 10% slower than the reference card of the RX 480. This is sufficient to play basically all the games from 2016 in Full HD and highest details – some games such as “Dirt Rally” can even be played in WQHD (2560x1440 pixels) or UHD (3840x2160 pixels). In general, users of high-resolution monitors had better wait for the upcoming high-end series "Vega" if they want a GPU from AMD, at least if you always want to activate the maximum settings.

The marginally faster RX 480 has got a strong internal rival with the RX 470 model, which are available for a little more than 200 Euros (~$222) – especially if you can live with the 4 GB version, which is currently sufficient for most games.

More gaming benchmarks are listed at the end of this article. They are constantly maintained and updated.