Wrap Ascending: PC Gaming on a sub-$140 GPU

The Radeon RX 460 was around 40% slower than the Radeon RX 470 and while its small lead over the R7 370 is more favorable superficial, it's worth memory that the 370 sold for $150 when it was released more than a year past. Likewise, the RX 460 was about on par with the GeForce GTX 950, a artwork card that was free this time parthian year for $160. Today the GTX 950 is marketing for As low Eastern Samoa $130.

Ready to cut those products, the Radeon RX 460's ~$110 MSRP has the potential to return a superior price per anatomy option, unless you slap 4GB onboard and try to betray it for $139 which is what many manufacturers like-minded Sapphire destine to brawl. In this case, tHe RX 460 remains a come to the fore, it's honourable a very small step.

American Samoa mentioned earlier, the RX 460 features 13% few cores than the R7 370 along with a massive downgrade to the memory interface which reduces bandwidth by 37%. Serving to offset this are subject improvements and a 23% boost in oftenness.

Given that the RX 460 was 13% faster than the R7 370 on average, we wondered how more than of this originated from the increase clock speed you bet much sack be attributed to the architectural refinements. To answer that question, we dug verboten some old art cards and began running a few quick tests. The results were interesting.

We started with the Radeon HD 7790, a GCN 2nd generation theatrical role boasting the same 896 cores. Although this GPU only operates at 1GHz, it has no more trouble flying at 1.2GHz once overclocked. The only subject to match them properly was the 1GB figure buffer storage of the card we had happening hand, which is an obvious hindrance concluded the RX 460's 4 gigs. That being the case we decided to test with older eSports games such As Counter-Strike and League of Legends.

To our surprise, the overclocked HD 7790 performed almost connected par to the RX 460. The cards were a gibe united of Legends, while the RX 460 showed a ~10% edge in Counter-Come to.

It then occurred to ME that the 7790 was rebadged in 2013 as the R7 260X, and we happened to have a 2GB model on give. The 260X ran at 1.1GHz so we only had to overclock by 100MHz this meter with a slight increase as wel required for the VRAM. Since we have more memory to recreate with this time I ran Star Wars: Front line, in which the overclocked R7 260X was sporty 7% slower than the RX 460, rendering 39fps on the average versus 42fps.

Curiously, the overclocked power consumption of the 7790 and 260X are virtually identical to the RX 460. Given more time, I would have liked to conduct additional testing, but based on what I've seen thus far for the typewrite of games the RX 460 is designed to play, the 4th Generation GCN computer architecture provides very little over what AMD offered back in 2013 for only $150.

Having stripped-down headroom for overclocking hurts the RX 460's value to someone who wants the most out of their money. We struggled to stabilize a 9% overclock connected the RX 460 while the GTX 950 can be pushed by almost 30% before perspiration information technology.

At long last, the RX 460 wads up well enough against Nvidia's year-grizzly budget offerings but its small advance in efficiency leaves us questioning how it will see beside a budget Pascal GPU. Furthermore, the budget Radeon is single attractive if you end up paying fewer than $120 for IT.

Pros: Matches Cuban sandwich-$150 GPU competition, sometimes information technology's a fraction faster. Polaris shines when tested with DirectX 12 and Vulkan titles.

Cons: Doesn't overclock well. 4GB card game are besides expensive.