Sapphire AMD RX 470 Crossfire Graphics Card Review

Final Thoughts

Price

Judging by the current UK pricing, two RX 470 cards should cost between £329.98-£379.99 depending on which model you choose. The budget Sapphire edition sporting a blower cooler retails for £164.99 from Overclockers UK which equates to a total of £329.98. When considering custom models, the pricing is teetering towards GTX 1070 territory which provides higher performance and enhanced compatibility with a wide range of games. Selecting the reference style Sapphire card is cheaper and remains within the price range of premium GTX 1060s. Honestly, the RX 470’s pricing is higher than I expected and it’s worth the extra money to own the RX 480 even if the performance difference remains rather small.

Overview

Despite the hullabaloo regarding DirectX 12’s multi-GPU capabilities, very few games take advantage of this potential. Whether you rely on DirectX 12’s API itself or employ Crossfire, the most likely scenario is the extra GPUs will not be utilised correctly. This also applies to NVIDIA solutions and demonstrates the complete lack of support. Instead of multi-GPU programming being pushed by either AMD or NVIDIA, it’s in the hands of developers on a per game basis. As a result, many studios believe it’s not worth the development time since multi-cards users constitute such a small section of the PC gaming market. Throughout the testing process, I encountered zero scaling with Hitman which is designed to be a flagbearer of DirectX 12.

Not only that, Ashes of the Singularity constantly locked up after enabling multi-GPU functionality and I couldn’t obtain any results even after hours of troubleshooting. This involved disabling the Steam overlay, running the client in Administrator mode, verifying the cache, attempting the benchmarks with Crossfire on and off as well as editing the configuration files  Sadly, none of these worked which made for a frustrating experience. To be clear, Ashes of the Singularity explicitly states that the multi-GPU feature isn’t polished and could cause stability issues. I’m uncertain if the crashing is a widespread problem which will be resolved at a later date or only effects the RX 470 due to early drivers.

On a more positive note, Rise of the Tomb Raider is capable of harnessing multi-GPU setups and the RX 470 achieved impressive scaling.  This was especially the case when paired with a 1920×1080 display and the frame-rate surged past 110. However, the game suffers from awful hitching and recorded a lower minimum frame-rate than a single card. In demanding sections when the rain is plummeting down, the lack of smoothness becomes a real issue and even though the monitored frame-rate is high, it feels jerky. As expected, I couldn’t benchmark Doom properly because the Vulkan API doesn’t support Crossfire either. I’m sure you can see a pattern emerging.

When it comes to DirectX 11, you’d expect there to be proficient scaling given its stature as the most widely used API. Annoyingly, a large portion of modern games include zero support for Crossfire as demonstrated by Just Cause 3. In Far Cry Primal, the picture is very confused and greatly depends on the resolution. For example, the 1080p benchmark was charactered by small gains while the 4K test made the GPU almost on par with a factory overclocked GTX 1080.

Initially, I decided to retain the normal graphics card review procedure so that readers could observe the kind of support across various APIs. Changing the games tested just to showcase the possible benefits multi-GPUs in the lucky few games which support it seemed disingenuous. However, the performance was so poor that I had no alternative but to include Shadow of Mordor. Thankfully, the game exhibited excellent scaling and it’s a shame this level of improvement isn’t widespread.

Would I recommend Crossfire right now? The answer is no, but I’d also respond the same way to people considering SLI. While older games support the technology fairly well, it’s an absolute pain to find modern games which have effective programming for multi-card setups. Whether you’re using DirectX 11, 12 or Vulkan the picture is bleak and doesn’t look like changing very soon. Hopefully, DirectX 12 will provide a direct form of multi-GPU scaling which would resign both Crossfire and SLI into the history books. It’s a shame but the old adage that buying one higher performing card is better than two lower-end products still rings true. If anything, this theory is apter than ever and you should avoid Crossfire and SLI unless you can accept some games not functioning while others have significant gains. As a reviewer, I’m now finding it very difficult to compile the usual Crosssfire and SLI reviews since most of my time is spent discussing how many games lack the essential support. Do yourself a favour by selecting a single RX 480 and upgrading at a later date or spend the extra and get something like the GTX 1070 or R9 Fury.

“The current state of Crossfire and SLI is appalling and I cannot recommend anyone to go down this route. Instead, buy the best single card you can afford and enjoy the latest games without any hassle.”

Thank you Sapphire for providing us with the review samples.