Introduction

The AMD Radeon RX 480 is an impressive graphics card that strikes a price-to-performance sweet spot for 1080p resolutions and beyond, at $239 for the 8 GB variant and just $199 for the 4 GB card. Be sure to check out our main review of the RX 480. We were wondering about just how viable the upgrade path for buyers of this card would be and had two cards lying around, which had us put them together for this Radeon RX 480 CrossFire review.

At $478 for two 8 GB cards or $398 for two 4 GB cards, Radeon RX 480 CrossFire presents an interesting alternative to buying a premium GeForce GTX 1070. What also makes RX 480 CrossFire an interesting solution are its low power requirements, which makes CrossFire with even smaller PSUs possible. You could get into this ecosystem with as little as $199 now and spend your Christmas stash on the second card a little later.

Unlike NVIDIA SLI, the latest AMD CrossFire is relatively painless, with no bridge cables running between cards. AMD is also pretty lax about its motherboard certification requirements, and so CrossFire should even work on boards with second PCIe x16 slots that are electrical x4 slots wired to the PCH.



In this review, we'll be putting this solution through its paces across our graphics benchmark suite. Its performance at 1440p and 4K could be particularly noteworthy.

Test System

Benchmark scores in other reviews are only comparable when this exact same configuration is used.

• All video card results are obtained on this exact system with exactly the same configuration.
• All games are set to their highest quality setting unless indicated otherwise.
• AA and AF are applied via in-game settings, not via the driver's control panel.

Each game is tested at these screen resolutions:

• 1600x900: Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens and laptops today (17" - 19").
• 1920x1080: Most common widescreen resolution for larger displays (22" - 26").
• 2560x1440: Highest possible 16:9 resolution for commonly available displays (27"-32").
• 3840x2160: 4K Ultra HD resolution, available on the latest high-end monitors.

Anno 2205

After the smash-hit Anno 2070 from three years ago, Ubisoft is back with an even more futuristic sim set in the year 2205 in which mankind has colonized the moon beyond scientific expeditions, having established flourishing economies set way up there. In addition to that, you get to build inspirational cities down here on Earth in various climates.

Based on a proprietary game engine, Anno 2205 takes advantage of DirectX 11, and unlike most RTS games, should be fairly taxing on modern graphics hardware owing to just how much more detail there is in the game's design and its models.