AMD Radeon RX 460 (Desktop) vs AMD Radeon RX Vega 6 (Ryzen 4000/5000)

AMD Radeon RX 460 (Desktop)

The AMD Radeon RX 460 is an entry-level gaming graphics card for desktop PCs. It was announced it August 2016 and is based on the smaller Polaris 11 chip (123 mm²), which is manufactured in a 14 nm FinFET process. The GPUs RX 470 and RX 480 on the other hand are based on the bigger Polaris 10 chip (232 mm²). The RX 460 uses 14 out of 16 Compute Units, all 16 ROPs, 56 TMUs, four 32-bit memory controller and 1 MB L2-cache. AMD specifies the clock with 1080 (base) up to 1200 MHz (Boost), but custom cards can have slightly higher clocks (like our test card from XFX at 1220 MHz). Contrary to Polaris 10, Polaris 11 supports Power Gating between the individual Compute Units. This will result in a lower consumption with partial workloads in particular. 

Depending on the memory equipment (2 or 4 GB GDDR5), the gaming performance of the RX 460 can differ quite a bit. Memory intensive games like Doom, Black Ops 3 or Mirror's Edge clearly suffer from just 2 GB. The 4 GB model is slightly faster than the mobile GeForce GTX 965M (refresh) as well as the desktop MSI Radeon R7 370 in our tests. This means the card is best suited for modern games in Full-HD at high details. The RX 460 is particularly convincing in DirectX 12 and Vulkan games.

Polaris 11 is up to date in terms of features. It supports DirectX 12, Vulkan, DisplayPort 1.3 HBR (1.4 Ready), HDMI 2.0, FreeSync, HDR, and H.265 de- and encoding. 

Thanks to the 14 nm FinFET process, the power consumption was significantly reduced compared to a similarly fast R7 370. The RX 460 is also much more frugal compared to the RX 470 and 480 and only needs a bit more power than the expensive GTX 1070 Founders Edition while idling. It is also much more frugal than the old R7 370 and roughly on par with the Maxwell chips (GTX 950 - 960) under load.

AMD Radeon RX Vega 6 (Ryzen 4000/5000)

The AMD Radeon RX Vega 6 is an integrated GPU for notebooks. It is used in certain Ryzen 5 APUs of the Renoir generation (Ryzen 4000 Mobile), which were launched in early 2020. The iGPU is based on the Vega architecture (5th generation GCN) and has 6 CUs (= 384 of the 512 shaders) clocked at up to 1,500 MHz. Compared to the similar Radeon RX Vega 6 in the Raven Ridge generation (Ryzen 2000 Mobile), the GPU is clocked significantly higher (1.500 versus 1.100 MHz Boost).

The performance depends on the configured TDP (12-54 W at launch), the clocks, the cooling, and the memory configuration). The GPU should benefit from fast dual-channel DDR4-3200 RAM (contrary to DDR4-2133 single-channel, which is also possible).

The Vega architecture offers some improvements over the Polaris generation and now supports DirectX 12 Feature Level 12_1. More information is available in our dedicated article about the Raven Ridge architecture.

The performance is clearly faster than the old RX Vega 6 thanks to the higher clock speed and faster main memory (if used). In first synthetic benchmarks, the Vega 6 was able to reach the performance of a dedicated GeForce MX150. In games it should be somewhere between a GeForce MX230 and MX150.

Thanks to the modern 7nm process and clever power-saving features, the power consumption is comparatively low (according to AMD), so the graphics adapter can also be used for slim and light notebooks.