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AMD Radeon RX 560 4GB Review — Tom’s Hardware

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Early Verdict

Radeon RX 560 doesn’t outperform its predecessor by as much as we expected. However, it’s still a fairly cool, fairly quiet card that serves up modest frame rates at 1920×1080 in modern games, so long as you’re willing to dial quality back to Medium presets.

Pros

+
Compelling 1080p performance at reduced detail settings
+
Manageable heat/power consumption
+
Radeon RX 560 4GB is reasonably priced if you find a $120 card

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AMD Radeon RX 560 4GB: Polaris 11 Rides Again

AMD’s Radeon RX 500-series refresh was a quick blitz of mostly recycled GPUs and iterative nomenclature. But there were a couple of developments that made the 500-series notably more competitive than the Radeon RX 400s before them.

For instance, we got a first taste of Polaris 12, code-named Lexa, in our Radeon RX 550 2GB Review. That GPU was designed to fill a gap under $100 (£120) where entry-level favorites like Radeon R7 260 and 360 once lived. It, along with Nvidia’s competing GeForce GT 1030, were welcome additions to a long-neglected segment.

Just above the RX 550 in its refreshed product stack, AMD unveiled a Radeon RX 560 that also piqued our interest. Last year, we identified the Radeon RX 460 as a clear step up from previous-gen Bonaire-based cards and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 750 Ti. Radeon RX 560 takes the same Polaris 11 GPU, enables all of its shading/texturing resources, increases its clock rate, and (theoretically) lowers its price.

If the RX 460 was already a strong option for HD gaming, we couldn’t wait to see how Radeon RX 560 improved upon it.

Meet Radeon RX 560: More Shaders; Higher Clocks

When Radeon RX 460 launched more than a year ago, we hadn’t seen a new mainstream GPU from AMD in years. Until then, everything was repackaged first- and second-generation GCN designs. Naturally, though, the shift to 14nm FinFET inherently meant new processors, even if they shared a lot of architectural attributes with their predecessors. Now the company is massaging its first wave of Polaris GPUs to better situate them against a full portfolio of Pascal-based competition.

Compared to Polaris 10, composed of 5.7 billion transistors on a 232 mm² die, Radeon RX 560’s processor packs three billion transistors into 123 square millimeters of die space. It’s similarly based on AMD’s fourth-gen GCN architecture, but rebalanced for more power-sensitive applications.

A single Graphics Command Processor up front is still responsible for dispatching graphics queues to the Shader Engines. So too are the Asynchronous Compute Engines tasked with handling compute queues. As with Polaris 10, this chip’s command processing logic consists of four ACEs, with two Hardware Scheduler units in place for prioritized queues, temporal/spatial resource management, and offloading CPU kernel mode driver scheduling tasks. While many resources are trimmed moving from Polaris 10 to 11, this is not one of them.

Shader Engines, on the other hand, are halved—Polaris 11 gets two, compared to Polaris 10’s four. But whereas the version of Polaris 11 that went into Radeon RX 460 featured seven active Compute Units per SE, Radeon RX 560 gets a completely uncut GPU sporting 16 total CUs. Given 64 Stream processors and four texture units per CU, the math for Radeon RX 560 adds up to 1024 shaders and 64 texture units across the GPU—a ~14% increase.

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Header Cell — Column 0	AMD Radeon RX 560	Asus ROG Strix RX 560 O4GB Gaming	Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050	Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
GPU	Polaris 11/Baffin	Polaris 11/Baffin	GP107	GP207
Shaders	1024	1024	640	768
Base Clock Frequency	1175 MHz	1221 MHz	1354 MHz	1290 MHz
Boost Clock Frequency	1275 MHz	1326 MHz	1455 MHz	1392 MHz
Memory Size & Type	4GB GDDR5	4GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5	4GB GDDR5
Process Technology	14nm	14nm	14nm	14nm
Transistors	3 Billion	3 Billion	3. 3 Billion	3.3 Billion
Texture Units	64	64	40	48
Texture Fillrate	81.6 GT/s	84.9 GT/s	58.2 GT/s	66.8 GT/s
ROPs	16	16	32	32
Pixel Fillrate	20.4 GPix/s	21.2 GPix/s	46.6 GPix/s	44.5 GPix/s
Memory Bus	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit
Memory Clock Frequency	3500 MHz	3500 MHz	3504 MHz	3504 MHz
Memory Bandwidth	112 GB/s	112 GB/s	112. 1 GB/s	112.1 GB/s
TDP	80W	80W/100W	75W	75W

Two render back-ends per Shader Engine, each with four ROPs, total 16 pixels per clock, or, again, half of what you get from Radeon RX 580/570. Polaris 11’s memory bus is also cut in half to 128 bits. AMD tries to compensate somewhat with 7 Gb/s GDDR5, but even then, you’re only looking at 112 GB/s of bandwidth. This spec is unchanged from the Radeon RX 460.

There are higher GPU clock rates to talk about, though. AMD specifies a base frequency of 1175 MHz and a Boost ceiling of 1275 MHz. The company sent our U.S. and German labs Asus’ ROG Strix Radeon RX 560 O4GB Gaming OC Edition to test, which is overclocked to a 1326 MHz Boost frequency in Gaming mode.

Interestingly, while the Radeon RX 460 was officially rated under 75W, opening the door to implementations without auxiliary power, all of the boards we tested had six-pin connectors. For its higher-clocked Radeon RX 560, AMD cites a typical board power of 80W. And yet, we’ve already seen versions with no power connector and higher-than-reference clock rates. Our Asus cards do, however, come equipped with six-pin inputs.

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AMD Radeon RX 560 4GB: Polaris 11 Rides Again

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AMD Radeon RX 560 benchmarks: the Red Team’s budget GPU simply isn’t powerful enough

At this point, we have to wonder — just how many Radeon RX 560s are on the market? When the graphics card first launched, there were both 2GB and 4GB versions. Some models had additional PCI Express power, some didn’t. Some had factory overclocks, while others remained at stock speeds. That’s confusing enough, but then a new version of the RX 560 with only 14 of the 16 available compute units enabled appeared — effectively a rebrand of the last generation RX 460. And then, multiple versions of that lower end configuration were unleashed upon the market as well.

So let’s help explain the situation by offering some initial recommendations if you are considering an RX 560. First of all, only consider the 4GB models of this card — the 2GB variants simply don’t have enough VRAM to be used in modern games at 1080p, and this will continue to be an issue going forward. Secondly, while the boost clocks for the RX 560 are in the region of 1220MHz to 1275MHz depending on the model, only cards with a PCI Express power input will actually be able to reach these speeds on a consistent basis. We tested a Gigabyte board without PCIe power and found that clocks could drop to 1190MHz and then fluctuate — though increasing the power slider using overclocking tool MSI Afterburner did counteract this behaviour.

All of these variations make things unduly confusing for the uninitiated and even make it difficult for us to decide which cards we should actually test. In the end, we decided to test both the 14 and 16 compute unit models of the RX 560, going with 4GB of RAM and equalised clock speeds. This should give you an idea of performance from the very best RX 560 models on the market, with only the compute unit count differing them.

Which GPUs are worth buying? We’ve made our picks for the best graphics cards available, updated with the latest graphics cards as they’re released. As well as an overall performance champ, we name the best value graphics card and best cheap graphics card to guide your next upgrade.

The chief competitors to the RX 560 come from the other major player in the graphics card space, Nvidia, who have also saw fit to offer a range of cards with slightly different specifications and abilities. There are three cards to consider from Team Green: the GTX 1050 2GB, the GTX 1050 3GB and the GTX 1050 Ti. All of the models we tested don’t require a PCIe power input, making them a little easier to run with budget power supplies. The more expensive Ti card is the fastest budget GPU on the market, while the cut-down 1050 2GB holds its own remarkably well as the cheapest GPU in our line-up, but occasionally tanks hard with games that with heavier VRAM requirements (Battlefield 1, we’re looking at you). The recently released 1050 3GB seemingly offers the best of both worlds, with anywhere from slightly worse to far better performance than the 2GB model at the same RRP — although retail availability in some regions remains distinctly subpar.

Numerous models of RX 560 are available — we chose to test the best possible models that feature both 14 and 16 compute units, with equalised, locked clocks.

Buy the AMD Radeon RX 560 from Amazon.

So here’s our data for the nine titles in our current test line-up. Our benchmark system is pretty advanced, but at the most basic level, the bar charts represent performance data expressed as an average and with bottom-end and top-end frame-rates too. Click on the bar chart to swap between frame-rate and percentage differentials with full mouse-over support. It’s pretty cool, but if you’re viewing this page on a desktop PC and you want to go even deeper, play the relevant video embed and watch frame-rate and frame-time telemetry play out for each card. You can even use the controls on the right side of the video to add or remove different cards from the real-time comparison.

Assassin’s Creed Unity

We begin with Assassin’s Creed Unity, the 2014 release of the near-annual series set in Revolution-era France. The game can be a stiff challenge for graphics cards with low amounts of VRAM, but the 4GB on both of our RX 560 cards should be enough to see off the challenge. However, the cards still fall down in comparison to their Nvidia rivals, coming in shy of the playable standard of 30 frames per second. The VRAM-starved GTX 1050 2GB sits just a couple of frames per second than the better RX 560, the GTX 1050 3GB is a few frames faster still, while the GTX 1050 Ti turns in the best result overall at a comfortable 37fps.