Interesting to see the extra ram hindering the gigabyte card - maybe the 4GB is sucking up power that would otherwise go to the GPU?

Xlucine
Interesting to see the extra ram hindering the gigabyte card - maybe the 4GB is sucking up power that would otherwise go to the GPU?

Hmmm, it's only really Tomb Raider where the 4GB version falls behind - everything else is within margin of error. That said, it's fairly well accepted that the RX 460 (and the reference RX 480, let's be honest) are essentially power-limited, and the 4GB Gigabyte draws more power than the 2GB, and Tomb Raider has the lowest frame rates of all the games, suggesting it's pushing the cards hardest, which would be where a power limit would hit hardest.

In other words; yeah, that's probably it ;)

I would have thought with the 460 you just go for the cheapest or possibly quietest, you don't want to pay a lot when the 470 is so very much faster.

DanceswithUnix
I would have thought with the 460 you just go for the cheapest or possibly quietest ….

Problem with going for the cheapest is hitting that 2GB barrier in certain games - which is demonstrated beautifully by the Doom results. That said, it'd be interesting to know if that was an artefact of playing with Ultra settings - would you see the same delta at High?

As to the power limit, you can use Wattman to tweak the voltages in the highest power states down slightly which both reduces power consumption and allows the card to maintain its boost clock. So maybe just going for the cheapest card and then playing with the settings is the way to go…

scaryjim
That said, it'd be interesting to know if that was an artefact of playing with Ultra settings - would you see the same delta at High?

I'm pretty sure I played Doom at 1440p on a 2GB R9 285 with no issues. I did have the advantage of Freesync, and wasn't stupid enough to play on ultra.

Ultra settings are supposed to require very high end kit to play, traditionally in Doom that means hardware that doesn't even exist when the game is released. So yeah, any benchmarks for mainstream cards should be done on sane settings not Ultra.

The 2GB card is still getting 39fps at ultra, which is respectable - totally playable, especially with freesync

Very interesting, but I could love to see where those cards stand with older ones.
I feel that my 7850 1GB sure is worst, but does it really worth it for me to go for a 460?
I guess many people will have older cards and keep an eye for the tech to be good enough to worth the upgrade.

Looking at getting a card around the £100 mark to replace my Radeon 6850. I haven't played any games for about a year but found the 6850 adequate for BF4 and XCOM. Be interesting to see how much better games look with an RX 460!