Benchmarking DX12 and Vulkan is a bit of a different beast. Working with DX9, 10, and 11 in the past has been a fairly painless ordeal requiring nothing more than a licensed copy of FRAPs and the FRAPs analyzing tool to provide us with frametimes as well as Average, 99th and 99.9th percentile lows. This allows for showing a more granular and accurate representation of how a game performs with a particular graphics card. Yes, there are more advanced methods such as FCAT, but for me that’s a bit out of reach due to the expense of the hardware required for capturing and analyzing the render outputs. So in walks DX12 and Vulkan….and this changes everything. Not having FCAT at my disposal I’ve resorted to learning the ins and outs of PresentMon. This has been no easy task for me but luckily I had a few hands from other reviewers learning how to best implement this. I want to take a moment and thank AdoredTV, Son of a Tech, and Donny from Custom PC Review. Thanks to these fellows I am now able to bring you all DX12 and Vulkan results going forward.

Cards

The two cards going head to head today are the XFX RX 480 8GB OC (flashed from 4GB) vs the NVIVIA GTX 1060 Founders Edition in our battery of DX12/Vulkan titles to see where things stand today with these next generation APIs.

XFX Radeon RX 480 8GB OC

The RX 480 is AMD Radeon’s latest generation Polaris based 14nm graphics card. The RX 480 features 2304 Stream Processors cranking up to 1266MHz, or 1288MHz in our case with the XFX OC model. It comes in one of two flavors of VRAM configurations with either 4GB GDDR5 clocked at 7Gbs or 8GB GDDR5 pumped to 8Gbs. This is all on a 256bit memory bus and sports a 150w TDP. We’re using the reference design card for these tests.

AMD RX 400 Series Specifications