The RX 480 and 580: A Review of Their Performance

If you own an RX 480 or 580, especially one of the nicer cards, it's worth considering selling it and upgrading to a GTX 1080. Currently, GTX 1080s can be bought for under $500 on New Egg. If you sell your RX 480 or 580 for say $400 and replace it with a GTX 1080 for $180, that's a deal.

Let's take a look at the results of these cards in action. We'll start by looking at the average frame rates we achieved during our testing. At 1080p, the RX 480 achieved an average of 139 frames per second, while the GTX 1080 achieved an average of 102 frames per second. This is not a huge drop off, especially when considering that if you had a 1440p ultrawide monitor, you'd likely be looking around 80 frames per second.

The jump from 1440p standard to 1440p ultra wide was significant, however. The RX 480 struggled to maintain frame rates at this resolution, while the GTX 1080 performed much better. At 4K, the situation became even more dire for the RX 480. Despite running Ultra detail settings, the card would often dip below 60 frames per second, and in some cases, as low as 41 frames per second.

However, if we move to High detail settings at 1080p, the performance of the GTX 1080 jumps up noticeably. The card becomes completely playable, with frame rates reaching 93 frames per second on average. This is because the card can maintain a consistent frame rate for most of the time, even when trying to render complex graphics.

The red bars in our graph represent the minimum frame rates we achieved during testing, and they're the ones that really matter if you want to play at Ultra detail settings. At 1080p, the GTX 1080 achieves an average of 93 frames per second, which is more than enough for most users. At 1440p, it's still a bit of a stretch, but the card can get around 73 frames per second on average.

However, if you want to play at 4K, things become much more difficult. Even with Ultra detail settings, the GTX 1080 struggles to maintain frame rates above 60 frames per second. In some cases, it even drops below this number, which is a major concern for anyone looking to play games at 4K.

It's worth noting that if you want to play at 1080p, you don't need an RX 480 or GTX 1080 Ti. A mid-range card like the GTX 1060 or RX 570/580 can still deliver smooth performance at high detail settings. This is especially true if you're looking for a more affordable option.

In general, our testing suggests that if you want to spend $750 on a graphics card, it's worth considering the GTX 1080 non-Ti. While it won't be able to maintain frame rates above 60 frames per second at 4K, it will still deliver smooth performance at 1440p and 1080p, especially when running High detail settings.

Overall, our testing has shown that while the RX 480 and 580 have their strengths, they're not ideal for playing games at 4K Ultra detail settings. If you want to play games at high frame rates, it's worth considering a more powerful card like the GTX 1080 non-Ti or another mid-range option like the GTX 1060 or RX 570/580.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello and welcome to Tech deals resolution and detail performance comparison today we are testing one game at multiple detail settings and multiple resolutions on the GTX 1080ti 11 GB graphics card the computer that we are testing this in today is the AMD ryzen 7 1700x running at a fixed 4.0 GHz with 16 GB of ddr4 29 33 MHz RAM installed the video you are watching was recorded using nvidia's Shadow play there's about a 5% performance loss on average for using the built-in recording software because we are testing resolutions other than 1080p today I have to use Shadow play because my Elgato hd60s capture card only works at 1080p fraps was used for The Benchmark results you'll see at the end of this video and MSI After Burner is used for the real-time performance numbers you see in the upper leftand corner of the screen today we are playing the the division 1080P 1440p and 4K this time we're only looking at Ultra detail I've done several of these videos looking at these three resolutions and in the past I've usually done two or three different detail levels however the division is now a slightly older game it's still beautiful it's still incredible but it really runs very well on Ultra so rather than taking the time to do nine different runs at three different detail levels I can use that time to test another game so I stuck to just Ultra detail on this Benchmark I have however played enough of the division personally I am after all in one of the expansions the underground cuz I've maxed out and finished the final story to be able to give you an idea of how well this game plays on a variety of graphics cards I've tested the division on 1080s 1070s RX 580s 570s 480s I've tested on GTX 1050t I've tested it on laptops I actually quite like this game much more so than I did when I first started playing playing it I started playing the division last year purely for benchmarking purposes I thought well I'll just run around the starter areas I'll do a few things no big deal and then I got drawn into it and so now here we are having finished the game playing the downloadable content if you look at our Real Time Performance numbers in the upper leand corner of the screen you will notice that we are using virtually all of the graphics cards power not quite 100% of it but we are darn close 96 97% the graphics card is running at 75° which is warm but well within normal temperatures and the fan is turning at 63% the actual RPM of the fan as reported by the graphics card is 1,800 RPM please note that these are all stock speeds on the graphics card I have not manually overclocked or adjusted the fan speed profile of this card and then you can see the actual clock speed of the core chip on the card is at 1936 megaherz how about vram Usage Now if you take a look at line two you will notice something we are using using Less Than 3 GB of vram I've commented on this in many other videos in the past for 1080p gaming you still don't need more than 3 GB of vram in the vast vast majority of situations and all current games will play at 1080p on a 3 GB or less card at some reasonable level of detail there's a couple of titles that won't do it on Ultra but very very few and everything will do it on high I only point this detail out because it's a common question in the comment section Ben many of my videos how much vram do I get the 3 or 6 gig 1060 do I get the four or the 8 gig RX 580 or 570 how much vram do we really need well there certainly are a handful of games that need a lot but frankly most don't need as much as you might think now how about CPU power this is a game that absolutely loves lots of cores and lots of CPU power if you take a look at line three you'll see that our ryzen 7 processor is bouncing between 40 and 50% we just jumped a little bit over but most of the time it's in the 40ish 45% range now what does this mean please keep in mind that this is a 16 thread processor so half of 16 which is eight cores is 50% so if we were maxing out all eight cores then we'd be at 50% if we're maxing four cores we'd be at 25% these numbers are exactly half of for example what an i7 would be which has 8 thread so 50% there is four cores now it isn't always exactly perfect like that but it's pretty close it's a good ballpark estimate for how much CPU power that you're using certainly if it reads 100% then you would in fact be using all 16 threads because you be maxing your CPU out now there are no games on the market today that remotely will use 16 threads but as you can see here there are absolutely games that will use eight of them I want you to skip line four for a minute and come down to line five the real time frame rate now we are getting anywhere between 120 all the way up to 150 frames per second I have read many comments in the pass from people saying that the Horizon 7 chips don't do well in high refresh rate gaming I don't know about you but that looks pretty darn good to me now the simple answer for this is the fact that we have eight real cores and we have a game that we use them now this is not true of all games if you get some older games in here if we get Grand Theft Auto 5 which absolutely uses four and maybe sometimes a bit more but not much more if you get other games in here Mass Effect Andromeda for example uses four very well but it doesn't necessarily use eight what what you'll end up with is a situation where all those extra cores kind of sit dormant however there are newer games and even some older games which have been patched this game Ghost Recon wildlands Assassin's Creed Syndicate and others are now starting to use these cores if you are building a top-end gaming computer in the summer of 2017 I find it very difficult to recommend a four core anything chip just due to the fact that if you want high performance with a high-end graphics card you really can make use of eight cores the these days now please understand I am making these comments in relation to a video testing a $750 graphics card I would make a slightly different comment if we were testing say a $200 GTX 1063 GB card which of course would not be doing 120 to 150 frames per second because it doesn't have the compute power to do it that would be a very different conversation a ryzen 5400 frankly would be enough for that card or a ryzen 5600 would also be excellent choice so how much CPU you buy and how much graphics card you buy really are tied together because you don't want to over buy one and under by the other I would not for example install a GTX 1060 into a ryzen 7 or even an i7 a 1070 would be the least I would install now I also would not install a GTX 1080 or 1080 TI I cannot believe I survived this but I actually did side note look how much damage I'm taking look at the grenades that are being thrown against me and yes I win this no I did not die I cannot believe it um what can I say I've gotten better at the game or at least not sucking quite so would you please stop shooting me with a flamethrower in any case I wouldn't put this graphics card in a lower-end machine either so basically you want to match up your graphics card with your CPU as a general rule your graphics card should cost at least as much if not more as your CPU now that might change over time but at the moment if you're going to buy say a $300 $350 Prof processor that pretty much puts you into the category of a GTX 1070 or amd's upcoming Vega processors more is also acceptable but I wouldn't spend any less likewise if you're only spending say $200 or less on your CPU I wouldn't put a $500 graphics card in 3 to 400 is the most I would spend a 1070 would be fine in either but I think a 1080 or 1080 TI is overkill for such a machine now there are a ton of effects going on all the fire the grenades the explosion one of the reasons this is such a good replay even though the frame rate is not as high as it otherwise could be is due to all of that all of that fire all of the enemies at once really drag down the frame rate you've seen it Spike to over 150 frames per second at various points during this run but that's during times nothing's happening and that's the problem with Benchmark charts Benchmark charts don't tell you how the performance is when it really really counts right now when I'm facing multiple enemies it's dipped down to like 105 to 110 frames a second now that's actually spectacular do not misunderstand me that's that's wonderful and amazing and great performance but we're using a 1080 we're using a $750 graphics card to get there so one other piece of advice I will offer Ultra detail is not necessary to have fun with the game lower the detail to high and you'll get much better frame rates why didn't I test it at both high and Ultra time everything takes time if I do that it takes away away from something else I did this is in fact very playable almost forgot the Loot Crate shame on me and now we're going to transition to the 1440p run so now we are playing at 1440p resolution this is 2560 by 1440p for those of you curious um 1440p standard is actually much closer to 1080p than it is to 4K and I think a lot of people look at the three and figure well it must be right in the middle you have 1080p as the low you have 1440p in the middle and then you have 4K as the High please note that 4K has 8.3 million pixels 1080p has just over 2 million 1440p has 3.6 there is only 1.6 million pixels difference between 1080P and 1440p but there is 4.7 million pixels difference between 1440p and 4K it is a much much larger Gap in fact there is a larger gap between 1440p and 4K than 1440p has pixels you're more than doubling whereas you're not even doubly making the jump to 1440p so what is in the middle 1440p Ultra wide the 21 by9 Ultra wide panels such as the 34-in screens that have 3440 across by 1440p vertical those screens have 5 million pixels 5 million pixels just so happens to be about 3 million less than 8 and about 3 million more than two so 1440p ultrawide is in fact in the middle between standard 4K and standard 1080p in terms of performance now why am I not testing it ultrawide because it's not nearly as common a monitor size as standard 1440p and the uploads wouldn't look very good to YouTube because YouTube only supports 169 which is what you're looking at here whereas 219 would put black bars and squish the screen however if you want to play 1440p ultrawide the GTX 1080 TI is an awesome card yes you can use a 1070 or a 1080 but for 5 million pixels yes I really would spend the money for this card it's 35% faster he didn't even know what hit him it's 35% faster than the 1080 and a good 60 to 70% faster depending upon the game than the 1070 now it is twice the price of the 1070 and it's not twice the performance but you always pay a premium to be at the top end it does have more video memory at 11 GB and it's faster video uh memory than the 1070 does so for twice the price of the 1070 you're getting not quite twice the performance but you are getting the ability to keep the card from much much longer without having to upgrade if you buy 1070 it'll be that much sooner that you have to take it out sell it put it in another machine get another card if you just go ahead and buy a 1080 yeah you're paying more up front yeah you're not quite getting double the performance but you're buying longevity you're buying the ability to use that card for an extra perhaps 2 years after which the 1070 would have to be be replaced I have done in the past a 1070 versus 1080 performance comparison I have not yet done 1070 versus 1080 versus 1080 TI those will be coming up soon and there's several reasons to do it and don't worry I will not reuse the video from the old tests it would not be fair why because drivers have been updated CPUs have been updated Windows has now been uh updated to the creators Edition update everything's been changed so the game benchmarks that I did 6 months ago are not reusable and anytime you're looking at uh big charts of performance comparisons across multiple CPUs and multiple graphics cards ask yourself this were they all run on the same driver and the same version of Windows and are they current this is one of the reasons why I don't do several of these and then put one big chart into a video combining all the runs from all the videos I've ever done the benchmarks I did 6 months ago may or may not be comparable to the benchmarks that are run today they age because Windows is always updating itself the video drivers are always being updated the games are often being patched a lot of these games continue to receive ongoing performance patches even older games rise of the Tomb Raider recently just received a big patch that improved direct X12 performance and ryzen performance they updated it for ryzen so you cannot compare how well say rise of the Tomb Raider ran 6 months ago on an i7 versus the way it would run at direct X12 on a ryzen 7 today and if you go search for those results and you see them side by side you have to ask were these tests rerun on the current version of everything now if we look at our Real Time Performance numbers you will see that our vram usage has gone up we're now at about 3 and 1 12 GB of vram now we're in the underground so it's the same basic area with the same basic Maps it's not the exact same map but the underground tends to be pretty consistent and I'm probably going to keep using it for future benchmarking because it's easy and quick to run the maps the enemies the distribution is all pretty similar yeah I think it's better in in some respects than randomly running around on the street because I found that the performance varies more there which enemies which missions Etc am I doing now please note I am aware that the PVP areas and the dark zone are more more demanding and runs slower than say this area does so if you are an avid player of the division keep in mind that certain endgame components PVP the dark Zone Etc perform worse than this but they'll perform worse at each resolution the performance will scale down why don't I test PVP I don't have any interest in PvP I really really don't not only that but lore talk about inconsistent performance how many enemies are being faced which section of the dark zone are we in how many people are on our side it's it's a challenge to Benchmark PVP now in Games like World of Tanks World of Warships OverWatch uh Etc I don't really have any choice because that's what those games are okay yes I know OverWatch technically has a verse AI mode but really that's that's not what people want to see benchmarked at least I don't think it is OverWatch is a competitive Online PVP game which is why it has to be tested that way now one interesting thing you'll notice is that the CPU usage here is lower than it was on the 1080p run now I fully recognize that many of you may not go out and buy $750 graphics cards to play at 1080p after all the division will play at 1080p at high detail on a GTX 1060 $200 graphics card just fine so you don't have to spend this kind of money to play 1080p it really is overkill Ultra detail is nice but not necessary however the CPU usage here is lower than it was on that run because the frame rate is lower frame rate loves CPU power frame rate is primarily driven by CPU power assuming you have the graphics power to do it what do I mean not everything is just Graphics now the graphics card draws the pretty images on the screen it draws the triangles it draws the environment it lays the textures on everything but it doesn't perform Collision detection it it doesn't do the AI it doesn't do the input controls and it doesn't generate what the triangles should be it draws the triangles but it doesn't actually make the world High frame rates require lots of CPU power all the graphics horsepower in the world will make no difference if you don't have oh there's a bomb all the graphics power in the world doesn't make a lick of difference if your CPU is holding you back so many times I'll see the question will this graphics card bottleneck that CPU or vice Versa that depends do you want to run at high frame rates at low resolutions you need lots of CPU power do you want to run at high resolutions that are okay with 60 frames per second you don't need as much CPU power for that that doesn't mean you can you know have no CPU power but it does mean that you don't need as much so you'll see that the uh actual CPU usage percentage is lower here because our frame rate is lower why is our frame rate lower we're at 1440p the graphics card has to draw 3.6 million pixels every frame so it can never draw as many frames as it could when we were at 1080p which is 2 million pixels per frame this is actually a really good time to transition to the 4K run while we're talking about CPU power and also an attempt to shorten the video because I don't want to make every game performance video I upload an hour long in fact I just finished yesterday afternoon well not from when you're watching this but from when I voiced it over two different 1 hourong game performance videos a they take a long time to edit and voice voice over these take longer to voice over than they than you do than it does to listen to them because I don't voice them over in real time um I check out each section think about what I want to say and what I want to point out watch each section come back for it over make some edits so I'll often spend for say an hour of voiceover work anywhere between 2 to 3 hours now back to the performance take a look at the CPU usage we are down to about 25 to 30% we were at 50% at 1080p what happened frame rates cut in half we are below 60 frames per second now our vram usage is up but not by much we are only at 3.8 GB of vram which is up over 3.5 from 1440p what that tells me is that this game doesn't really have 4K textures it it doesn't if it did that vram usage would be miles miles higher so while it's better and it's higher we are not really effectively making use of the 11 GB of vram but again remember the division is not a new game and there's still plenty PL of games that are not getting 4K textures because how many people are playing at 4K how many people really have 11 GB vram video cards very few in fact even 8 GB is incredibly rare still what's the most common amount of vram that the average gamer today in 2017 has 2 GB yep two what's the second most common vram available today one four would be the next place however keep in mind that far more than than 50% of all current video cards in use by Gamers at least according to the steam Hardware survey are either 1 or 2 GB cards game companies are not going to spend tens of millions of dollars developing games that only people with 8 GB cards can run the percentage of people who actually have 8 GB or more such as 1070s 1080s 1080 TI RX 480s uh RX 580s or even the old R R9 390 and 390 X that had 8 GB of vram can be counted on probably one hand it actually might be slightly over 5% at this point but it's less than 10 so while it's nice to have the 11 GB of vram frankly for most of the life of this card half of that vram is going to go completely unused even at 4K but if you buy this card planning to keep it for 3 plus years you will grow into it there will be Games 2 years from now 3 years from now that really will start to use it especially now that we're seeing updates to the consoles the new Xbox One X the project Scorpio that has four times the graphics performance of the Xbox One launch console that supports gaming at 4K sort of kind of not really but it you know it will output at 4K and it will say it's running at 4K even though it's not because it actually has RX 580 levels of graphics performance but hey who's counting it will upscale it'll play a lot of games at 1440p and it will upscale them to 4K but it puts us in the general direction of wanting better textures and better quality it does B way interestingly enough have more RAM than the Xbox One did and so for displaying games at higher resolutions for inducing game companies to come out with higher texture detail to use vram note that the Xbox One X does in fact have more RAM in it than the Xbox One does allowing game companies to make versions of their game with higher textures of course what's happening there is that we're going to end up with two versions of the same game One requirement Microsoft has is that any game that runs on an X Xbox One X must also run on the Xbox one oh boy could they have not made that more confusing in any case so the Xbox 1 x has four times the graphics performance and about 35 to 40% more CPU power than the launch Xbox one and it has 50% more RAM it's combined RAM and it's faster the launch version had DDR3 they finally put gddr5 Ram so the ram is phenomenally faster you have more of it you have four times the graphics performance games will look much better well they will if they're updated or designed for it what will probably happen now is that games will come with two different sets of textures they'll come with higher resolution textures and a few extra details so they will look better and shinier at higher resolution on an Xbox 1X but they can load the lower resolution textures and the simplified models to play on an original Xbox one boy that sounds an awful lot like PC gaming doesn't it gee wasn't console gaming supposed to be simple where basically you bought a console and everything played on it and it looked the same no matter what you did and the performance was the same no matter what you did while they have to make the games work on the original Xbox One and they will for a while don't be surprised if a year or two from now games perform better they do 60 frames per second on the Xbox One X and only 30 frames per second on the Xbox one so now consoles are kind of getting that division like the way PC games have had since basically forever if there is any Cloud to that silver lining it's this if game companies are going to create 4K versions of their game to look nice and shiny on the Xbox One X console and whatever the PlayStation 4 comes out with to compete with it assuming it does then that means that they will have already developed them and can drop them into their PC ports of their games keep in mind that most of these games these days are really developed for console first PC second wonderful quality PC ports so what that essentially means yeah you can run but you can't hide I got you with my 50,000 damage with one shot sweet 46 that is a nice I like this rifle in any case so what this means is that over the next couple of years you will start to see the vram being used no you don't have to have 11 gigs the 8 GB cards will be fine but it does mean that 3 years from now if you're interested in playing AAA gaming titles and you want to play them at high quality detail settings three and 4 GB cards will probably not be enough now some of you will hear that and go wait a minute I I thought we could keep those cards for a while you can but then how are we supposed to play it all to detail okay let's take a GTX 1060 for a minute let's give it 20 gigs of vram just for the sake of fun all right now we're going to Advance 3 years in the future so you can play games at Ultra detail right no you won't be able to why it won't have the compute horsepower it won't have the cudic cor the computational capability to play games at that detail setting it'll have plenty of vram it will look gorgeous all the textures will load into VR RAM and it will run at 5 frames per second so it's worth noting that just increasing vram does not make a game play if it needs more compute power so does that mean that I think that the 6 and 8 GB versions of the 1060 and rx580 are a waste no they are a price premium but not much of one if you can find the higher gigabyte versions of those cards the 580 and the 1060 in the $30 to $40 range they're worth paying I would be comfortable with paying $30 maybe $40 at the most price premium to jump from 3 to 6 gigs on the 1060 or from 4 to 8 on the RX 580 I would not pay more when the 1060 launched for example there was a $60 price premium between the 3 and the 6 gig card it's not worth $60 for that because the card will age out for compute power at some point and you're paying $60 for what one extra detail setting in terms of texture quality oh fair enough I can appreciate that but keep in mind that unless you have all the money in the world which case you weren't buying a 1060 or 580 anyway that $60 could go to your solid state drive it could go to your processor it could go to a nicer case or a nicer cooler for your CPU for overclocking the question is not is that extra vram useful or is that card faster it's what else could the money buy $60 for example will upgrade you from a 250 GB solid state drive to a 500 GB solid state drive not only are the 500 GB versions of the ssds generally faster than the 256 gig versions but the extra space will mean that you can install more games more programs you run out of space further into the future and basically just have a better overall machine so it's ultimately a personal choice as to what you buy actually I think the sweet spot at the moment really has moved on from the GTX 1060 I think we're starting to move to the 1070 and when I was doing this voice over they actually were in short supply due to the current crypto mining craze a couple of weeks ago you could find some crazy good deals on the GTX 1070 and even the rx580 when the rx580 launched you could buy 8 GB versions of the rx580 for $220 on New Egg and at the time there was only a $20 price difference between the four and the 8 gig versions of those cards and I said at the time lord for $20 this is a no brainer you buy the 8 gig version all day long done easy simple do it and $220 for an RX 588 gig is a great deal it's a great card now it's not as fast as a 1070 but for $220 that's a great price good luck finding one for that price today now if you're watching this video far in the future you may have missed the entire cryptocurrency craze Bitcoin values are up and the RX 580s and even now 1070s are getting very hard to find for a reasonable price due to the fact that they are being bought up hundreds at a time by cryptocurrency miners you can actually use them to mine these coins which if you're not familiar with them is basically mathematical calculations that can be exchanged for money because people think they're worth money and I guess maybe they are if people think they are but what it does is it makes it hard to find them for gamers as of the date of me doing the voiceover of this video every single um RX 570 580 470 and 480 was out of stock at New Egg at Amazon and pretty much everywhere else online that you could go search for these things are selling for nearly double retail price on eBay at the moment and they are selling look at the completed and sold uh listings for the fact that they are in fact selling what this actually brings up is an interesting point if you own an rx480 or 580 especially uh one of the nicer cards you might actually consider selling it spend a bit of money and trade up to a GTX 1080 you can currently buy GTX 1080s not the ti but the 1080 for under $500 on New Egg if you can sell your rx480 or 580 for say $400 and replace it with a $180 for $500 that's a deal maybe I should do a video on that in any case let's go take a look at the results and here we are at the results now if you use the timestamps in the video description below to skip ahead to this I understand at least watch a minute or two of each card to see the real time frame rate to better understand these numbers let's start with the green bars these are the average frame rates we had 139 frames per second at 1080p 102 frames per second average at 1440p and 55 frames per second average at 4K why the huge drop off well I talked about that in detail during the runs be sure to go back and watch them if you missed it but essentially the drop from 1080p to standard 1440p is not that bad if you had a 1440p ultrawide you'd probably be looking around 80 frames per second just to give you an idea of the drop off off for the jump from 1440p standard to 1440p ultra wind as far as 4K goes if you want to play the division at 4K High detail yes it will run at Ultra but look at the dips down to 41 and 31 on the minimums I strongly strongly recommend you move it to high detail the performance will jump up noticeably you'll add 15 to 25 frames per second on those three bars and it will become completely playable this simply shows the difference between Ultra and the only reason I didn't do h is because High detail at 1080p on this graphics card is a bit silly you become completely CPU bound and it doesn't show the performance so this shows the drop off curve but play 4K at high detail now the red bars and the blue bars are 1% and. 1% minimum numbers in short I think you should focus on the red bars they're the ones that represent the performance you will get at a minimum 99% of the time the blue ones just take it a decimal place further and are closer to the true minimum so at 1080p at Ultra detail we'll get at least 93 frames per second 99% of the time of course way higher than that most of the time at 1440p Ultra will get at least 73 frames per second 99% of the time and at 4K we get 41 which does get kind of rough now I would like to make one very clear point if you want to play at 1080p you don't need a 1080 TI you can absolutely play the division on a 1060 or RX 570 or 580 at high detail and you'll get about 60 frames a second you won't be getting 139 but you'll get 60-ish plus frames per second on 200 to $250 cards at least if you can find any with the current crypto uh mining craze going on as far as 1440p I would personally step up to a GTX 1070 it does have a solid 50% performance jump over the lower-end cards and at 1440p I think that's very valuable and frankly at high detail this game will play just fine at 4k on a GTX 1080 non TI card now it's going to dip below 60 frames a second in doing that and you might want to turn antialising completely off because at 4K I don't think it's as important but you don't have to spend $750 the whole point here is to Simply show you if you are going to spend $ 750 what can it do in the division I hope this video was helpful and useful to you click that like button share this video with your friends remember to subscribe to my channel check the video description for links to everything in this video please consider supporting me on patreon links down in the description below if you are able to if not liking sharing subscribing and commenting is also appreciated thank you so much for watching I will see you in my next videohello and welcome to Tech deals resolution and detail performance comparison today we are testing one game at multiple detail settings and multiple resolutions on the GTX 1080ti 11 GB graphics card the computer that we are testing this in today is the AMD ryzen 7 1700x running at a fixed 4.0 GHz with 16 GB of ddr4 29 33 MHz RAM installed the video you are watching was recorded using nvidia's Shadow play there's about a 5% performance loss on average for using the built-in recording software because we are testing resolutions other than 1080p today I have to use Shadow play because my Elgato hd60s capture card only works at 1080p fraps was used for The Benchmark results you'll see at the end of this video and MSI After Burner is used for the real-time performance numbers you see in the upper leftand corner of the screen today we are playing the the division 1080P 1440p and 4K this time we're only looking at Ultra detail I've done several of these videos looking at these three resolutions and in the past I've usually done two or three different detail levels however the division is now a slightly older game it's still beautiful it's still incredible but it really runs very well on Ultra so rather than taking the time to do nine different runs at three different detail levels I can use that time to test another game so I stuck to just Ultra detail on this Benchmark I have however played enough of the division personally I am after all in one of the expansions the underground cuz I've maxed out and finished the final story to be able to give you an idea of how well this game plays on a variety of graphics cards I've tested the division on 1080s 1070s RX 580s 570s 480s I've tested on GTX 1050t I've tested it on laptops I actually quite like this game much more so than I did when I first started playing playing it I started playing the division last year purely for benchmarking purposes I thought well I'll just run around the starter areas I'll do a few things no big deal and then I got drawn into it and so now here we are having finished the game playing the downloadable content if you look at our Real Time Performance numbers in the upper leand corner of the screen you will notice that we are using virtually all of the graphics cards power not quite 100% of it but we are darn close 96 97% the graphics card is running at 75° which is warm but well within normal temperatures and the fan is turning at 63% the actual RPM of the fan as reported by the graphics card is 1,800 RPM please note that these are all stock speeds on the graphics card I have not manually overclocked or adjusted the fan speed profile of this card and then you can see the actual clock speed of the core chip on the card is at 1936 megaherz how about vram Usage Now if you take a look at line two you will notice something we are using using Less Than 3 GB of vram I've commented on this in many other videos in the past for 1080p gaming you still don't need more than 3 GB of vram in the vast vast majority of situations and all current games will play at 1080p on a 3 GB or less card at some reasonable level of detail there's a couple of titles that won't do it on Ultra but very very few and everything will do it on high I only point this detail out because it's a common question in the comment section Ben many of my videos how much vram do I get the 3 or 6 gig 1060 do I get the four or the 8 gig RX 580 or 570 how much vram do we really need well there certainly are a handful of games that need a lot but frankly most don't need as much as you might think now how about CPU power this is a game that absolutely loves lots of cores and lots of CPU power if you take a look at line three you'll see that our ryzen 7 processor is bouncing between 40 and 50% we just jumped a little bit over but most of the time it's in the 40ish 45% range now what does this mean please keep in mind that this is a 16 thread processor so half of 16 which is eight cores is 50% so if we were maxing out all eight cores then we'd be at 50% if we're maxing four cores we'd be at 25% these numbers are exactly half of for example what an i7 would be which has 8 thread so 50% there is four cores now it isn't always exactly perfect like that but it's pretty close it's a good ballpark estimate for how much CPU power that you're using certainly if it reads 100% then you would in fact be using all 16 threads because you be maxing your CPU out now there are no games on the market today that remotely will use 16 threads but as you can see here there are absolutely games that will use eight of them I want you to skip line four for a minute and come down to line five the real time frame rate now we are getting anywhere between 120 all the way up to 150 frames per second I have read many comments in the pass from people saying that the Horizon 7 chips don't do well in high refresh rate gaming I don't know about you but that looks pretty darn good to me now the simple answer for this is the fact that we have eight real cores and we have a game that we use them now this is not true of all games if you get some older games in here if we get Grand Theft Auto 5 which absolutely uses four and maybe sometimes a bit more but not much more if you get other games in here Mass Effect Andromeda for example uses four very well but it doesn't necessarily use eight what what you'll end up with is a situation where all those extra cores kind of sit dormant however there are newer games and even some older games which have been patched this game Ghost Recon wildlands Assassin's Creed Syndicate and others are now starting to use these cores if you are building a top-end gaming computer in the summer of 2017 I find it very difficult to recommend a four core anything chip just due to the fact that if you want high performance with a high-end graphics card you really can make use of eight cores the these days now please understand I am making these comments in relation to a video testing a $750 graphics card I would make a slightly different comment if we were testing say a $200 GTX 1063 GB card which of course would not be doing 120 to 150 frames per second because it doesn't have the compute power to do it that would be a very different conversation a ryzen 5400 frankly would be enough for that card or a ryzen 5600 would also be excellent choice so how much CPU you buy and how much graphics card you buy really are tied together because you don't want to over buy one and under by the other I would not for example install a GTX 1060 into a ryzen 7 or even an i7 a 1070 would be the least I would install now I also would not install a GTX 1080 or 1080 TI I cannot believe I survived this but I actually did side note look how much damage I'm taking look at the grenades that are being thrown against me and yes I win this no I did not die I cannot believe it um what can I say I've gotten better at the game or at least not sucking quite so would you please stop shooting me with a flamethrower in any case I wouldn't put this graphics card in a lower-end machine either so basically you want to match up your graphics card with your CPU as a general rule your graphics card should cost at least as much if not more as your CPU now that might change over time but at the moment if you're going to buy say a $300 $350 Prof processor that pretty much puts you into the category of a GTX 1070 or amd's upcoming Vega processors more is also acceptable but I wouldn't spend any less likewise if you're only spending say $200 or less on your CPU I wouldn't put a $500 graphics card in 3 to 400 is the most I would spend a 1070 would be fine in either but I think a 1080 or 1080 TI is overkill for such a machine now there are a ton of effects going on all the fire the grenades the explosion one of the reasons this is such a good replay even though the frame rate is not as high as it otherwise could be is due to all of that all of that fire all of the enemies at once really drag down the frame rate you've seen it Spike to over 150 frames per second at various points during this run but that's during times nothing's happening and that's the problem with Benchmark charts Benchmark charts don't tell you how the performance is when it really really counts right now when I'm facing multiple enemies it's dipped down to like 105 to 110 frames a second now that's actually spectacular do not misunderstand me that's that's wonderful and amazing and great performance but we're using a 1080 we're using a $750 graphics card to get there so one other piece of advice I will offer Ultra detail is not necessary to have fun with the game lower the detail to high and you'll get much better frame rates why didn't I test it at both high and Ultra time everything takes time if I do that it takes away away from something else I did this is in fact very playable almost forgot the Loot Crate shame on me and now we're going to transition to the 1440p run so now we are playing at 1440p resolution this is 2560 by 1440p for those of you curious um 1440p standard is actually much closer to 1080p than it is to 4K and I think a lot of people look at the three and figure well it must be right in the middle you have 1080p as the low you have 1440p in the middle and then you have 4K as the High please note that 4K has 8.3 million pixels 1080p has just over 2 million 1440p has 3.6 there is only 1.6 million pixels difference between 1080P and 1440p but there is 4.7 million pixels difference between 1440p and 4K it is a much much larger Gap in fact there is a larger gap between 1440p and 4K than 1440p has pixels you're more than doubling whereas you're not even doubly making the jump to 1440p so what is in the middle 1440p Ultra wide the 21 by9 Ultra wide panels such as the 34-in screens that have 3440 across by 1440p vertical those screens have 5 million pixels 5 million pixels just so happens to be about 3 million less than 8 and about 3 million more than two so 1440p ultrawide is in fact in the middle between standard 4K and standard 1080p in terms of performance now why am I not testing it ultrawide because it's not nearly as common a monitor size as standard 1440p and the uploads wouldn't look very good to YouTube because YouTube only supports 169 which is what you're looking at here whereas 219 would put black bars and squish the screen however if you want to play 1440p ultrawide the GTX 1080 TI is an awesome card yes you can use a 1070 or a 1080 but for 5 million pixels yes I really would spend the money for this card it's 35% faster he didn't even know what hit him it's 35% faster than the 1080 and a good 60 to 70% faster depending upon the game than the 1070 now it is twice the price of the 1070 and it's not twice the performance but you always pay a premium to be at the top end it does have more video memory at 11 GB and it's faster video uh memory than the 1070 does so for twice the price of the 1070 you're getting not quite twice the performance but you are getting the ability to keep the card from much much longer without having to upgrade if you buy 1070 it'll be that much sooner that you have to take it out sell it put it in another machine get another card if you just go ahead and buy a 1080 yeah you're paying more up front yeah you're not quite getting double the performance but you're buying longevity you're buying the ability to use that card for an extra perhaps 2 years after which the 1070 would have to be be replaced I have done in the past a 1070 versus 1080 performance comparison I have not yet done 1070 versus 1080 versus 1080 TI those will be coming up soon and there's several reasons to do it and don't worry I will not reuse the video from the old tests it would not be fair why because drivers have been updated CPUs have been updated Windows has now been uh updated to the creators Edition update everything's been changed so the game benchmarks that I did 6 months ago are not reusable and anytime you're looking at uh big charts of performance comparisons across multiple CPUs and multiple graphics cards ask yourself this were they all run on the same driver and the same version of Windows and are they current this is one of the reasons why I don't do several of these and then put one big chart into a video combining all the runs from all the videos I've ever done the benchmarks I did 6 months ago may or may not be comparable to the benchmarks that are run today they age because Windows is always updating itself the video drivers are always being updated the games are often being patched a lot of these games continue to receive ongoing performance patches even older games rise of the Tomb Raider recently just received a big patch that improved direct X12 performance and ryzen performance they updated it for ryzen so you cannot compare how well say rise of the Tomb Raider ran 6 months ago on an i7 versus the way it would run at direct X12 on a ryzen 7 today and if you go search for those results and you see them side by side you have to ask were these tests rerun on the current version of everything now if we look at our Real Time Performance numbers you will see that our vram usage has gone up we're now at about 3 and 1 12 GB of vram now we're in the underground so it's the same basic area with the same basic Maps it's not the exact same map but the underground tends to be pretty consistent and I'm probably going to keep using it for future benchmarking because it's easy and quick to run the maps the enemies the distribution is all pretty similar yeah I think it's better in in some respects than randomly running around on the street because I found that the performance varies more there which enemies which missions Etc am I doing now please note I am aware that the PVP areas and the dark zone are more more demanding and runs slower than say this area does so if you are an avid player of the division keep in mind that certain endgame components PVP the dark Zone Etc perform worse than this but they'll perform worse at each resolution the performance will scale down why don't I test PVP I don't have any interest in PvP I really really don't not only that but lore talk about inconsistent performance how many enemies are being faced which section of the dark zone are we in how many people are on our side it's it's a challenge to Benchmark PVP now in Games like World of Tanks World of Warships OverWatch uh Etc I don't really have any choice because that's what those games are okay yes I know OverWatch technically has a verse AI mode but really that's that's not what people want to see benchmarked at least I don't think it is OverWatch is a competitive Online PVP game which is why it has to be tested that way now one interesting thing you'll notice is that the CPU usage here is lower than it was on the 1080p run now I fully recognize that many of you may not go out and buy $750 graphics cards to play at 1080p after all the division will play at 1080p at high detail on a GTX 1060 $200 graphics card just fine so you don't have to spend this kind of money to play 1080p it really is overkill Ultra detail is nice but not necessary however the CPU usage here is lower than it was on that run because the frame rate is lower frame rate loves CPU power frame rate is primarily driven by CPU power assuming you have the graphics power to do it what do I mean not everything is just Graphics now the graphics card draws the pretty images on the screen it draws the triangles it draws the environment it lays the textures on everything but it doesn't perform Collision detection it it doesn't do the AI it doesn't do the input controls and it doesn't generate what the triangles should be it draws the triangles but it doesn't actually make the world High frame rates require lots of CPU power all the graphics horsepower in the world will make no difference if you don't have oh there's a bomb all the graphics power in the world doesn't make a lick of difference if your CPU is holding you back so many times I'll see the question will this graphics card bottleneck that CPU or vice Versa that depends do you want to run at high frame rates at low resolutions you need lots of CPU power do you want to run at high resolutions that are okay with 60 frames per second you don't need as much CPU power for that that doesn't mean you can you know have no CPU power but it does mean that you don't need as much so you'll see that the uh actual CPU usage percentage is lower here because our frame rate is lower why is our frame rate lower we're at 1440p the graphics card has to draw 3.6 million pixels every frame so it can never draw as many frames as it could when we were at 1080p which is 2 million pixels per frame this is actually a really good time to transition to the 4K run while we're talking about CPU power and also an attempt to shorten the video because I don't want to make every game performance video I upload an hour long in fact I just finished yesterday afternoon well not from when you're watching this but from when I voiced it over two different 1 hourong game performance videos a they take a long time to edit and voice voice over these take longer to voice over than they than you do than it does to listen to them because I don't voice them over in real time um I check out each section think about what I want to say and what I want to point out watch each section come back for it over make some edits so I'll often spend for say an hour of voiceover work anywhere between 2 to 3 hours now back to the performance take a look at the CPU usage we are down to about 25 to 30% we were at 50% at 1080p what happened frame rates cut in half we are below 60 frames per second now our vram usage is up but not by much we are only at 3.8 GB of vram which is up over 3.5 from 1440p what that tells me is that this game doesn't really have 4K textures it it doesn't if it did that vram usage would be miles miles higher so while it's better and it's higher we are not really effectively making use of the 11 GB of vram but again remember the division is not a new game and there's still plenty PL of games that are not getting 4K textures because how many people are playing at 4K how many people really have 11 GB vram video cards very few in fact even 8 GB is incredibly rare still what's the most common amount of vram that the average gamer today in 2017 has 2 GB yep two what's the second most common vram available today one four would be the next place however keep in mind that far more than than 50% of all current video cards in use by Gamers at least according to the steam Hardware survey are either 1 or 2 GB cards game companies are not going to spend tens of millions of dollars developing games that only people with 8 GB cards can run the percentage of people who actually have 8 GB or more such as 1070s 1080s 1080 TI RX 480s uh RX 580s or even the old R R9 390 and 390 X that had 8 GB of vram can be counted on probably one hand it actually might be slightly over 5% at this point but it's less than 10 so while it's nice to have the 11 GB of vram frankly for most of the life of this card half of that vram is going to go completely unused even at 4K but if you buy this card planning to keep it for 3 plus years you will grow into it there will be Games 2 years from now 3 years from now that really will start to use it especially now that we're seeing updates to the consoles the new Xbox One X the project Scorpio that has four times the graphics performance of the Xbox One launch console that supports gaming at 4K sort of kind of not really but it you know it will output at 4K and it will say it's running at 4K even though it's not because it actually has RX 580 levels of graphics performance but hey who's counting it will upscale it'll play a lot of games at 1440p and it will upscale them to 4K but it puts us in the general direction of wanting better textures and better quality it does B way interestingly enough have more RAM than the Xbox One did and so for displaying games at higher resolutions for inducing game companies to come out with higher texture detail to use vram note that the Xbox One X does in fact have more RAM in it than the Xbox One does allowing game companies to make versions of their game with higher textures of course what's happening there is that we're going to end up with two versions of the same game One requirement Microsoft has is that any game that runs on an X Xbox One X must also run on the Xbox one oh boy could they have not made that more confusing in any case so the Xbox 1 x has four times the graphics performance and about 35 to 40% more CPU power than the launch Xbox one and it has 50% more RAM it's combined RAM and it's faster the launch version had DDR3 they finally put gddr5 Ram so the ram is phenomenally faster you have more of it you have four times the graphics performance games will look much better well they will if they're updated or designed for it what will probably happen now is that games will come with two different sets of textures they'll come with higher resolution textures and a few extra details so they will look better and shinier at higher resolution on an Xbox 1X but they can load the lower resolution textures and the simplified models to play on an original Xbox one boy that sounds an awful lot like PC gaming doesn't it gee wasn't console gaming supposed to be simple where basically you bought a console and everything played on it and it looked the same no matter what you did and the performance was the same no matter what you did while they have to make the games work on the original Xbox One and they will for a while don't be surprised if a year or two from now games perform better they do 60 frames per second on the Xbox One X and only 30 frames per second on the Xbox one so now consoles are kind of getting that division like the way PC games have had since basically forever if there is any Cloud to that silver lining it's this if game companies are going to create 4K versions of their game to look nice and shiny on the Xbox One X console and whatever the PlayStation 4 comes out with to compete with it assuming it does then that means that they will have already developed them and can drop them into their PC ports of their games keep in mind that most of these games these days are really developed for console first PC second wonderful quality PC ports so what that essentially means yeah you can run but you can't hide I got you with my 50,000 damage with one shot sweet 46 that is a nice I like this rifle in any case so what this means is that over the next couple of years you will start to see the vram being used no you don't have to have 11 gigs the 8 GB cards will be fine but it does mean that 3 years from now if you're interested in playing AAA gaming titles and you want to play them at high quality detail settings three and 4 GB cards will probably not be enough now some of you will hear that and go wait a minute I I thought we could keep those cards for a while you can but then how are we supposed to play it all to detail okay let's take a GTX 1060 for a minute let's give it 20 gigs of vram just for the sake of fun all right now we're going to Advance 3 years in the future so you can play games at Ultra detail right no you won't be able to why it won't have the compute horsepower it won't have the cudic cor the computational capability to play games at that detail setting it'll have plenty of vram it will look gorgeous all the textures will load into VR RAM and it will run at 5 frames per second so it's worth noting that just increasing vram does not make a game play if it needs more compute power so does that mean that I think that the 6 and 8 GB versions of the 1060 and rx580 are a waste no they are a price premium but not much of one if you can find the higher gigabyte versions of those cards the 580 and the 1060 in the $30 to $40 range they're worth paying I would be comfortable with paying $30 maybe $40 at the most price premium to jump from 3 to 6 gigs on the 1060 or from 4 to 8 on the RX 580 I would not pay more when the 1060 launched for example there was a $60 price premium between the 3 and the 6 gig card it's not worth $60 for that because the card will age out for compute power at some point and you're paying $60 for what one extra detail setting in terms of texture quality oh fair enough I can appreciate that but keep in mind that unless you have all the money in the world which case you weren't buying a 1060 or 580 anyway that $60 could go to your solid state drive it could go to your processor it could go to a nicer case or a nicer cooler for your CPU for overclocking the question is not is that extra vram useful or is that card faster it's what else could the money buy $60 for example will upgrade you from a 250 GB solid state drive to a 500 GB solid state drive not only are the 500 GB versions of the ssds generally faster than the 256 gig versions but the extra space will mean that you can install more games more programs you run out of space further into the future and basically just have a better overall machine so it's ultimately a personal choice as to what you buy actually I think the sweet spot at the moment really has moved on from the GTX 1060 I think we're starting to move to the 1070 and when I was doing this voice over they actually were in short supply due to the current crypto mining craze a couple of weeks ago you could find some crazy good deals on the GTX 1070 and even the rx580 when the rx580 launched you could buy 8 GB versions of the rx580 for $220 on New Egg and at the time there was only a $20 price difference between the four and the 8 gig versions of those cards and I said at the time lord for $20 this is a no brainer you buy the 8 gig version all day long done easy simple do it and $220 for an RX 588 gig is a great deal it's a great card now it's not as fast as a 1070 but for $220 that's a great price good luck finding one for that price today now if you're watching this video far in the future you may have missed the entire cryptocurrency craze Bitcoin values are up and the RX 580s and even now 1070s are getting very hard to find for a reasonable price due to the fact that they are being bought up hundreds at a time by cryptocurrency miners you can actually use them to mine these coins which if you're not familiar with them is basically mathematical calculations that can be exchanged for money because people think they're worth money and I guess maybe they are if people think they are but what it does is it makes it hard to find them for gamers as of the date of me doing the voiceover of this video every single um RX 570 580 470 and 480 was out of stock at New Egg at Amazon and pretty much everywhere else online that you could go search for these things are selling for nearly double retail price on eBay at the moment and they are selling look at the completed and sold uh listings for the fact that they are in fact selling what this actually brings up is an interesting point if you own an rx480 or 580 especially uh one of the nicer cards you might actually consider selling it spend a bit of money and trade up to a GTX 1080 you can currently buy GTX 1080s not the ti but the 1080 for under $500 on New Egg if you can sell your rx480 or 580 for say $400 and replace it with a $180 for $500 that's a deal maybe I should do a video on that in any case let's go take a look at the results and here we are at the results now if you use the timestamps in the video description below to skip ahead to this I understand at least watch a minute or two of each card to see the real time frame rate to better understand these numbers let's start with the green bars these are the average frame rates we had 139 frames per second at 1080p 102 frames per second average at 1440p and 55 frames per second average at 4K why the huge drop off well I talked about that in detail during the runs be sure to go back and watch them if you missed it but essentially the drop from 1080p to standard 1440p is not that bad if you had a 1440p ultrawide you'd probably be looking around 80 frames per second just to give you an idea of the drop off off for the jump from 1440p standard to 1440p ultra wind as far as 4K goes if you want to play the division at 4K High detail yes it will run at Ultra but look at the dips down to 41 and 31 on the minimums I strongly strongly recommend you move it to high detail the performance will jump up noticeably you'll add 15 to 25 frames per second on those three bars and it will become completely playable this simply shows the difference between Ultra and the only reason I didn't do h is because High detail at 1080p on this graphics card is a bit silly you become completely CPU bound and it doesn't show the performance so this shows the drop off curve but play 4K at high detail now the red bars and the blue bars are 1% and. 1% minimum numbers in short I think you should focus on the red bars they're the ones that represent the performance you will get at a minimum 99% of the time the blue ones just take it a decimal place further and are closer to the true minimum so at 1080p at Ultra detail we'll get at least 93 frames per second 99% of the time of course way higher than that most of the time at 1440p Ultra will get at least 73 frames per second 99% of the time and at 4K we get 41 which does get kind of rough now I would like to make one very clear point if you want to play at 1080p you don't need a 1080 TI you can absolutely play the division on a 1060 or RX 570 or 580 at high detail and you'll get about 60 frames a second you won't be getting 139 but you'll get 60-ish plus frames per second on 200 to $250 cards at least if you can find any with the current crypto uh mining craze going on as far as 1440p I would personally step up to a GTX 1070 it does have a solid 50% performance jump over the lower-end cards and at 1440p I think that's very valuable and frankly at high detail this game will play just fine at 4k on a GTX 1080 non TI card now it's going to dip below 60 frames a second in doing that and you might want to turn antialising completely off because at 4K I don't think it's as important but you don't have to spend $750 the whole point here is to Simply show you if you are going to spend $ 750 what can it do in the division I hope this video was helpful and useful to you click that like button share this video with your friends remember to subscribe to my channel check the video description for links to everything in this video please consider supporting me on patreon links down in the description below if you are able to if not liking sharing subscribing and commenting is also appreciated thank you so much for watching I will see you in my next video\n"