Gear & Gadgets —
Nvidia or AMD: Who makes the best budget graphics card?
If you can’t quite stretch to a GTX 1060 or RX 480, there’s a clear winner at under £200.
What constitutes a “budget” graphics card? I’d argue that it’s anything that costs less than £250/$250. Although—as evidenced by the, uhh, constructive feedback on the Nvidia GTX 1060 and AMD RX 480 reviews—not everyone agrees. Fortunately, both AMD and Nvidia have updated their range of sub-£250 graphics cards in recent months, with their more efficient Polaris and Pascal architectures promising better performance without the need for extravagant cooling and power requirements. The cheapest card of the lot, AMD’s RX 460, costs a mere £112/$110.
At this end of the market, where the cheapest cards don’t even require an external power connector to function, the target is good quality 1080p gaming above 30FPS, or high frame rates for e-sports players at 720p. These are those modest goals that all the graphics cards on test hit, but what’s surprising is just how much performance you get for such a small outlay. No, the RX 470, RX 460, GTX 1050 Ti, and GTX 1050 won’t blow your socks off in the same way a GTX 1080 will, but they are all excellent, affordable cards that fill a niche and price point.
The question is, which of these budget wonders offers the most bang for your buck?
Baby Polaris and Pascal
AMD’s budget offerings are the RX 470 and RX 460. Both are based on its 14nm FinFET Polaris architecture, which debuted in the excellent RX 480, but they use quite different GPUs. The RX 470 features the same Polaris 10 GPU as the RX 480 with a handful of Compute Units (CUs) disabled, leaving 2,048 stream processors and 128 texture units. Core clocks and memory clocks are both down too, although some of the more astute manufacturers have made up for this deficiency with mild factory overclocks. The RGB LED-laden Asus Strix Gaming card on test, for example, features a small 50MHz overclock on the core (this was dialled back to stock speeds for the benchmarks).
RX 480 RX 470 RX 460 GTX 1060 GTX 1050 Ti GTX 1050
Shader Cores 2,304 2,048 896 1,280 768 640
Texture Units 144 128 56 80 48 40
ROPs 32 32 16 48 32 32
Core Clock 1,120MHz 926MHz 1,090MHz 1,506MHz 1,290MHz 1,354MHz
Boost Clock 1,266MHz 1,206MHz 1,200MHz 1,708MHz 1,392MHz 1,455MHz
Memory Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit 128-bit 192-bit 128-bit 128-bit
Memory Speed 8GHz 6.6GHz 7GHz 7GHz 7GHz 7GHz
Memory Bandwidth 256GB/s 211.2GB/s 112GB/s 192GB/s 112GB/s 112GB/s
Memory Size 8GB GDDR5 4GB GDDR5 4GB GDDR5 6GB GDDR5 4GB GDDR5 2GB GDDR5
TDP 150W 120W 75W 120W 75W 75W
Price £230/$240 £180/$180 £114/$130 £240/$250 £140/$140 £112/$110
The RX 460 uses the much smaller Polaris 11 GPU, which is also used in many of AMD’s laptop graphics cards. It doesn’t require 6-pin PCIe power, making it a good upgrade for off-the-shelf systems from the likes of Dell and HP. As such, there’s a big gap in specs between the RX 460 and the RX 470. Aside from the obvious reduction in CUs, the memory bus is halved to 128-bits with a 7000MHz clock speed, resulting in just 112GB/s of bandwidth (2GB or 4GB versions are available). That’s not a huge problem given the smaller GPU, but games with larger textures that need to be shuffled in and out of memory will suffer.
Read more @ https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/01/best-budget-graphics-card/
