Early Open-Source Linux Benchmarks Of The AMD Radeon RX 470

Written by Michael Larabel in Graphics Cards on 9 August 2016 at 11:29 AM EDT. Page 1 of 5. 35 Comments.

With my Radeon RX 470 retail unit finally having arrived yesterday, I've been running many benchmarks of this graphics card compared to other AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards under Linux. For your viewing pleasure today is the very tip of the iceberg of many RX 460 and RX 470 Linux benchmarks to be published on Phoronix over the days to come.

Being published today are some open-source driver performance figures of the Radeon RX 470 and some of the other AMD graphics cards in my possession. This article will be succeeded by another tomorrow with more AMD GPU tests as well as my initial Radeon RX 460 results, as it looks like the RX 460 I bought from NewEgg yesterday will already be arriving today. On the NVIDIA side is the near complete line-up of Maxwell and Pascal cards using the latest proprietary Linux driver.

Following these open-source AMDGPU results for the RX 460/470 will then be my AMDGPU-PRO benchmark results, which will allow for publishing OpenCL and Vulkan results, with the Clover OpenCL compute state being less than ideal for benchmarking and the lack of a viable open-source AMD Vulkan driver yet. I had intended to do AMDGPU-PRO RX 460/470 testing first, but with the test box I was using for benchmarking I started out my NVIDIA tests on Ubuntu 16.10... When it came time to try to install the AMDGPU-PRO driver on Ubuntu 16.10, the DKMS module would fail to build even if using the 4.4 kernel from the Xenial archive, etc. Thus for the AMDGPU-PRO tests I'll need to re-test all of the graphics cards again back under Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

So for now the comparison today includes the Radeon R9 270X, R7 370, R9 Fury, and RX 480 and on the NVIDIA side are GeForce GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080. The open-source driver tests were with Linux 4.8-rc1 and Mesa 12.1-dev Git from the Padoka PPA. The NVIDIA 367.35 driver was used for the proprietary driver tests. Again, tomorrow will be initial RX 460 figures plus the other AMD GCN cards I have within my possession, simply due to being short on time since today's testing. The system was powered by an Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake CPU with MSI C236A Workstation motherboard, 16GB of RAM, Samsung SSD 950 PRO NVMe 256GB SSD, and a Acer 4K display.

The Radeon RX 470 graphics card I purchased for testing was the SAPPHIRE NITRO+ Radeon RX 470 4GB (100407NT+4GOCL) as the first available RX 470 graphics card I could find in stock last week on launch day at NewEgg.com. This SAPPHIRE NITRO+ Radeon RX 470 ended up costing $209 USD or $239 when including taxes and shipping, which isn't much cheaper than a Radeon RX 480 8GB. The SAPPHIRE NITRO+ Radeon RX 470 has a factory overclock to 1260MHz compared to the 1143MHz reference clock frequency. The video memory is at 1750MHz.

All of these initial AMDGPU+RadeonSI open-source results for the RX 470 and other AMD graphics cards were conducted in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. The AC system power consumption was also monitored during the testing process via a WattsUp Pro power meter so the Phoronix Test Suite could reliable provide performance-per-Watt metrics too.

Continue on to see these initial open-source RX 470 results while staying tuned for the AMDGPU-PRO numbers along with RX 460 numbers. If you appreciate all of this Linux hardware testing -- including when I need to purchase the relevant hardware for review -- please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium to help support the site while you also benefit from these large articles on a single-page, ad-free. Thanks for your support.


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