Amd radeon rx 480 8gb vs 4gb benchmarks

The announcement of the Radeon RX 480 raised a lot of expectation due to its aggressive recommended price of $ 199, this figure has finally translated into about 220-230 euros in the Spanish market for the model with 4 GB of memory. Many users wonder if the 4 GB version is enough or is it worth stretching a bit more and going for the 8 GB version.

AMD Radeon RX 480: video comparison between the 8 GB and the 4 GB version

As always Digital Foundry helps us out of doubt with a new video comparison between the 8 GB AMD Radeon RX 480 and its cheapest version with only 4 GB of memory. Recall that in the version with 8 GB of memory, it works at a speed of 8 Gbps while in the 4 GB version it works at 7 Gbps so there is a loss of bandwidth from 256 GB / s to 224 GB / s.

1920 × 1080 (1080p)	RX 480 4GB	RX 480 8GB	R9 390 8GB	GTX 1060 6GB	GTX 970 4GB
Assassin's Creed Unity, Ultra High, FXAA	50.4	50.8	48.6	58.2	51.3
Ashes of the Singularity, Extreme, 0x MSAA, DX12	45.9	47.7	52.1	45.9	40.5
Crysis 3, Very High, SMAA T2x	68.8	70.1	75.4	78.7	72.5
The Division, Ultra, SMAA	53.6	54.8	49.8	56.6	50.2
Far Cry Primal, Ultra, SMAA	57.1	58.7	65.1	65.6	56.2
Hitman, Ultra, SMAA, DX12	71.4	73.2	75.6	65.8	59.0
Rise of the Tomb Raider, Ultra, SMAA, DX12	59.8	61.2	66.6	75.1	69.7
The Witcher 3, Ultra, Post AA, No HairWorks	60.5	61.2	55.6	68.4	60.7

2560 × 1440 (1440p)	RX 480 4GB	RX 480 8GB	R9 390 8GB	GTX 1060 6GB	GTX 970 4GB
Assassin's Creed Unity, Ultra High, FXAA	31.0	33.8	33.7	37.4	32.7
Ashes of the Singularity, Extreme, 0x MSAA, DX12	40.7	42.7	46.2	41.2	35.9
Crysis 3, Very High, SMAA T2x	41.8	43.1	48.7	47.7	43.8
The Division, Ultra, SMAA	38.1	39.0	37.8	39.9	36.1
Far Cry Primal, Ultra, SMAA	40.7	42.3	46.7	45.0	39.6
Hitman, Ultra, SMAA, DX12	52.2	55.0	56.8	48.1	41.5
Rise of the Tomb Raider, Ultra, SMAA, DX12	41.7	43.0	46.0	49.2	46.1
The Witcher 3, Ultra, Post AA, No HairWorks	43.5	45.3	42.9	48.2	31.9

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Digital Foundry tests are based on 1080p and 2K resolutions and show that the behavior of both cards is very similar, the loss of performance ranges from 1% to 4%, so it seems more than clear that today the 4GB model is the most cost effective. Much of the lost performance will be due to less bandwidth so if we overclock the memory of the card from 4 GB to 8 Gbps the loss will be even less.

conclusion

The conclusion seems very clear, if you are going to buy a card to play 1080p the AMD Radeon RX 480 4 GB is the best option right now, we doubt that this card is going to run out of memory before it powers the kernel so that 8 GB is not going to be a clear benefit in the future.

With this the AMD Radeon RX 480 4 GB is shown as a much more attractive performance / price option than the GeForce GTX 1060, something that is not so clear in its 8 GB version that is very close to the price of Nvidia cards cheaper than they have been seen.