Posted by Nathan Kirsch | Thu, Jun 30, 2016 - 11:45 AM

Jump To: Page 1: 4GB versus 8GB of Memory on the Radeon RX 480 Page 2: Test System Page 3: Battlefield 4 Page 4: Fallout 4 Page 5: Far Cry 4 Page 6: 3DMark & Final Thoughts

Battlefield 4

Battlefield 4 is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) and published by Electronic Arts. It is a sequel to 2011’s Battlefield 3 and was released on October 29, 2013 in North America. Battlefield 4’s single-player Campaign takes place in 2020, six years after the events of its predecessor. Tensions between Russia and the United States have been running at a record high. On top of this, China is also on the brink of war, as Admiral Chang, the main antagonist, plans to overthrow China’s current government; and, if successful, the Russians will have full support from the Chinese, bringing China into a war with the United States.

This game title uses the Frostbite 3 game engine and looks great. We tested Battlefield 4 with the Ultra graphics quality preset as most discrete desktop graphics cards can easily play with this IQ setting at 1080P and we still want to be able to push the higher-end cards down the road. We used FRAPS to benchmark with these settings on the Shanghai level. All tests were done with the DirectX 11 API.

Benchmark Results: At 1080p resolution we found the AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB was 5 FPS faster on average than the AMD Radeon RX 480 4GB. This comes out to be a 5.8% performance advantage to the 8GB card when running the reference card clock speeds. When we overclocked the memory on the 4GB card up to 8Gbps the performance jumped up and was almost as fast as what we saw on the 8GB card.

Benchmark Results: When scaling the resolution up to 2k (2160×1440) there was only a 3 FPS difference on average betwen the RX 480 8GB and RX 480 4GB, but that comes out to be a 5.8% performance gap from the memory reduction and slower clock frequencies.

Benchmark Results: When it comes to 4k UHD gaming, the Radeon RX 480 8GB was found to be 6.6% faster than the Radeon RX 480 4GB. We were expecting a larger performance gap at 4K since the memory on the 4GB card was fully used, but there wasn’t.