GTX 1060 vs. RX 480 in 6 year old AMD and Intel Computers

Introduction

Recently the thing to do if you’re a YouTube tech reviewer is to find the oldest most rubbish motherboard you can and see if the RX 480 will work – it’s a lot of fun. I thought it might be interesting to get onboard this latest craze and in doing so, add a little twist by also testing with the GTX 1060.

So I began digging out the oldest and most forgotten about hardware in the office. My search turned up a few AM3 boards along with a couple of LGA1156 boards. The only “problem” was they all worked with the 480, booted into Windows, played games, and well… they worked.

Rather than head down to the local electronics recycling center to see what garbage they had lying around I gave up on the idea and instead changed gears to something else, something I feel is even more interesting.

Having already dusted off an old Core i5-750 system along with a Phenom II X4 955 system from the same era, I had a light bulb moment. Why not test both systems using the RX 480 and GTX 1060 to see how these new mid-range GPUs compare in old systems.

More than likely gamers making the upgrade to a current gen mid-range GPUs aren’t rocking the latest Core i7 processor overclocked to 4.5GHz. Instead many are probably running a more affordable previous generation Core i3 or Core i5 processor, or alternatively, one of AMD’s Phenom or FX processors.

So we’ve seen how the 480 and 1060 compare when they aren’t being restrained by CPU limitations, but how do they get on with a much lesser processor? In this video we’re going to find out. I should point out that neither the i5-750 or X4 955 have been overclocked or tweaked in any way. Included purely for comparison is my standard GPU test rig as I already have the results for both GPUs in this system. This is an overclocked PC so I’m not trying to make a direct comparison here but rather show how fast these mid-range GPUs are when not hampered by a system bottleneck.

Benchmarks

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Starting with The Witcher 3 we see that the GTX 1060 was 11% faster than the RX 480 on my 6700K test system. Moving to the i5-750 system reduced the 1060 performance by 30% but despite that the 1060 was still 10% faster than the RX 480 on the old Core i5 rig. Moving to the Phenom II X4 system the 1060 drops a further 11% down to 38 fps. Here we find that on the AMD system the RX 480 and 1060 deliver the same 38 fps average.

Star Wars Battlefront

For benchmarking Star Wars Battlefront we use a single player tutorial which isn’t very CPU demanding at all, making this primarily a GPU test. As such the GTX 1060 delivers very similar performance on all three systems. The RX 480 provides very similar performance on both the Intel rigs but does slow down quite a bit on the Phenom system.

Fallout 4

Fallout 4 is a massive system resource hog so I’m not surprised to see some major variations in performance here. That said the performance trends remain quite similar for the most part. Looking at the minimum frame rate the 1060 was 20% faster than the RX 480 on the Core i7-6700K test system. Meanwhile on the Core i5-750 system the 1060’s minimum frame rate was 27% higher. Finally on the Phenom II X4 system we find that the 1060 is just 5% faster.

Tom Clancy’s The Division

The Division shows pretty similar performance trends across all three systems and it’s really only the RX 480 & Phenom II X4 combo that sees a big hit in the minimum frame rate department.

ARMA 3

ARMA 3 isn’t a CPU intensive game… at least not in the way that many seem to believe. This game is poorly optimized and doesn’t utilize more than a single CPU thread heavily. As a result CPUs with strong single thread IPC performance win out. The highly clocked 6700K shows this as the GTX 1060 averaged 72 fps. This result was reduced to just 40 fps with the i5-750 and then 31 fps with the Phenom II X4. Interestingly the RX 480 actually compared better with the GTX 1060 on the slower processors.

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst isn’t a CPU intensive game and as a result the margins remain fairly consistent across all three systems.

Total War: Warhammer [DX11]

Total War Warhammer is an interesting title that provided interesting results though be aware we only tested using the DX11 mode. The RX 480 actually looks better in relation to the GTX 1060 on the slower systems which is surprising.

DOOM

The Doom results are particularly telling and honestly I was expecting to see more results like this. Using either OpenGL or Vulkan we see that the RX 480 plays considerably worse than the GTX 1060 on the older systems.

While the RX 480 was faster on the 6700K system using Vulkan by a 16% margin, it’s actually 21% slower when using the Core i5-750 rig and 29% slower on the Phenom II system.

Ashes of the Singularity

Here we see DX12 does a good job of keeping the RX 480 in the game when testing on the slower systems. It was 15% slower than the 1060 on the 6700K test system when running the game in the DX11 mode. When we move to the Core i5-750 machine the 480 is now 35% slower. However using DX12 we see the same 6% decline in performance.

Conclusion

Well I didn’t manage to run into any compatibility issues with my Radeon RX 480 on these old systems but I did end up finding some interesting results. For the most part the 480 didn’t fare nearly as poorly against the GTX 1060 as I thought it might. There were of course exceptions though such as Doom and Ashes of the Singularity using DX11.

It was interesting, although admittedly not all that surprising, to see just how much slower these new mid-range graphics cards were on these old quad-core systems. It’s also been a long time since I’ve seen the Core i5-750 face the Phenom II X4 955 and honestly I had forgotten how much better the Intel processor was for gaming. The performance difference is likely being amplified by the use of modern games that take full advantage of quad-core processors, with the exception of ARMA 3.

In short it appears you’re going to see similar performance margins between the RX 480 and GTX 1060 on older hardware. On that note you’re also going to see considerably greater performance when using a modern processor or at least a relatively modern processor overclocked. I didn’t have time to overclock the Core i5 and Phenom II X4 processors for this video but perhaps I can do a more indepth video in the near future featuring more GPU and GPU configurations if you guys are keen to see it. What did you guys think of these results? Let me know in the comments