AMD has claimed that the Radeon RX 480 can beat the GTX 1080 in a CrossFire setup which obviously means that it would also jump over the GTX 1070.
Two Radeon RX 480 costs roughly $500 while the cheapest GTX 1080 could cost around $600. The Ashes of the Singularity benchmark was used and it became controversial to the point that AMD had to clarify the issue through Reddit as people noticed an image quality disparity between the two benchmarks.
Since the Radeon RX 480 has been released for several days now, some users have tried out whether two RX 480s in a CrossFire setup does beat a single GTX 1080. The AMD Radeon RX 480 CrossFire setup did hold up to get more frames at 55.2 fps compared to the GTX 1080's 57.2 fps in an AOTS benchmark, Ars Technica has learned.
The result was kind of disappointing but people already expected that it would not really beat the new NVIDIA GPU king. Ars UK's rig was not able to replicate the framerates of AMD's original AOTS benchmark it showed during the reveal of the Polaris 10 card.
One silver lining is that the two RX 480 cards were able to beat the GTX 1070's 47 fps. However, a single GTX 1070 would still be a better choice considering that it won't cost $500 plus it would be able to support most games.
Both the NVIDIA SLI and CrossFire technology are still far from perfect. There are just a number of games that fully support the tech which should make the most out of the two, three or four cards in a system.
The RX 480 CrossFire setup was also found to just excel at 6 out of 16 tests and benchmarks that it was tested on, TechPowerUp reported. It would mean that a single GTX 1070 and a GTX 1080 would still be the best option for the average gamer who would like to play all of the games they want with good framerates.
In conclusion, the benchmarks and reports show that two RX 480 cards in a CrossFire setup can come close to the GTX 1080 and even beat the GTX 1070 but not in every test or video game available. There are even power draw problems with the Radeon RX 480 as AMD is set to launch a driver fix in a couple of days.