Today AMD is adding a new graphics card to the Polaris family. While it's been rumored for months and the specs have leaked from all corners of the web, it's finally official: the Radeon RX 590 is here and it hits retail for a suggested base price of $279. So what's this thing all about? Is it yet another refresh? Does its performance warrant an upgrade?
The answer depends largely on what GPU you currently own, but AMD is certainly doing its best to coax the money out of your wallet with a very compelling triple game bundle.
Before we get into the details, know that this is not remotely a review. Unfortunately I only received my RX 590 (the gloriously thick XFX Fatboy model) a few hours before today's embargo lifted. I'll be quoting some of AMD's internal benchmarks here, but pitting them against my own test bench results over the next few days.
Within the week I'll have gaming benchmarks comparing the RX 590 against the RX 580 and Nvidia GTX 1060, across both Windows and Linux.
12nm RX 580?
Yea, kind of! It seems unfair to label the RX 590 as strictly a "rebrand" though, because it does use a 12nm FinFET process as opposed to the RX 580's 14nm one. On the other hand, when comparing crucial specs the similarities between the RX 580 and RX 590 are undeniably similar.
Both have the same die size. Both have 36 Compute Units. Both have 2304 Stream Processors. Both have 256 GB/s memory bandwidth.
The key difference is clock speeds. Where the reference RX 580 GPU clocks were 1257 MHz base / 1340 MHz boost, the RX 590 harnesses the improved 12nm process to deliver a base GPU clock of 1469 MHz and a boost clock of 1545MHz.
That's about a 15% clock speed improvement over the RX 580, and AMD claims it's a 12% overall performance boost versus the RX 580. If we were only talking about a few percentage points, I'd feel totally comfortable calling it a rebrand. The 12nm process also brings slightly higher peak compute to the party (7.1 TFLOPS vs 6.17 TFLOPS).
You'll also notice that despite the process improvement, attaining higher clock speeds requires more power.
But what does that mean with real world gaming performance? Will you want to upgrade from an RX 580 to an RX 590? That's an emphatic no, but if you're still rocking a last-gen Polaris RX 480 or perhaps an Nvidia GTX 970, AMD wants to make a case for its newest member of Polaris being your preferred upgrade choice.
They're making two key arguments to win your wallet.
#1: Games Are Getting Hungry For More Graphics Power
During my press briefing with AMD, they showed a couple interesting charts. One depicted how new entries in the same game franchise are roughly 15% more demanding. They picked three newer games -- Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Battlefield 5 and Middle Earth: Shadow of War -- and stacked them against their previous entries.
Here's what AMD's internal results showed, running all six games at 1080p under max settings with a Radeon RX 480:
You can see that in two of the newer sequels, the RX 480 no longer maintains 60 FPS. That's to be expected as game engines evolve and developers learn how to increase the amount of eyecandy across the board.
You'll also notice that AMD tries to be clever with the chart by using 2015 versus 2018. Polaris launched in 2016 so in reality we're only talking about a 2.5 year difference. While that's not really a parlor trick, well, it is a marketing trick.
Still, encouraging gamers to finally upgrade their GPU after 2.5 years isn't an unreasonable request to make for a company in the business of selling graphics cards.
But what if you've been contemplating another midrange GPU like Nvidia's GTX 1060?
#2: RX 590 > GTX 1060?
Nvidia's GTX 1060 is one hell of a card, and it's typically traded blows with AMD's Radeon RX 580 (but of course trumps it in power efficiency). Now AMD has an offering that colors in the $150 price gap between the Vega 56 and RX 580. On the competitive side, it should also fall somewhere between the GTX 1060 and GTX 1070.
To illustrate that point, AMD ran a few internal benchmarks with the Sapphire Nitro RX 590 versus the Asus Strix GTX 1060 (6GB) at 1080p max settings:
These are notable performance differences, especially for players wanting an uncompromising 60 FPS experience.
AMD's RX 590 Reviewer's Guide expands the benchmarks to 16 titles, with the RX 590 claiming victory in all but two of them (GTA V and Assassin's Creed Odyssey).
The answer depends largely on what GPU you currently own, but AMD is certainly doing its best to coax the money out of your wallet with a very compelling triple game bundle.
Before we get into the details, know that this is not remotely a review. Unfortunately I only received my RX 590 (the gloriously thick XFX Fatboy model) a few hours before today's embargo lifted. I'll be quoting some of AMD's internal benchmarks here, but pitting them against my own test bench results over the next few days.
Within the week I'll have gaming benchmarks comparing the RX 590 against the RX 580 and Nvidia GTX 1060, across both Windows and Linux.
12nm RX 580?
Yea, kind of! It seems unfair to label the RX 590 as strictly a "rebrand" though, because it does use a 12nm FinFET process as opposed to the RX 580's 14nm one. On the other hand, when comparing crucial specs the similarities between the RX 580 and RX 590 are undeniably similar.
Both have the same die size. Both have 36 Compute Units. Both have 2304 Stream Processors. Both have 256 GB/s memory bandwidth.
The key difference is clock speeds. Where the reference RX 580 GPU clocks were 1257 MHz base / 1340 MHz boost, the RX 590 harnesses the improved 12nm process to deliver a base GPU clock of 1469 MHz and a boost clock of 1545MHz.
That's about a 15% clock speed improvement over the RX 580, and AMD claims it's a 12% overall performance boost versus the RX 580. If we were only talking about a few percentage points, I'd feel totally comfortable calling it a rebrand. The 12nm process also brings slightly higher peak compute to the party (7.1 TFLOPS vs 6.17 TFLOPS).
You'll also notice that despite the process improvement, attaining higher clock speeds requires more power.
But what does that mean with real world gaming performance? Will you want to upgrade from an RX 580 to an RX 590? That's an emphatic no, but if you're still rocking a last-gen Polaris RX 480 or perhaps an Nvidia GTX 970, AMD wants to make a case for its newest member of Polaris being your preferred upgrade choice.
They're making two key arguments to win your wallet.
#1: Games Are Getting Hungry For More Graphics Power
During my press briefing with AMD, they showed a couple interesting charts. One depicted how new entries in the same game franchise are roughly 15% more demanding. They picked three newer games -- Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Battlefield 5 and Middle Earth: Shadow of War -- and stacked them against their previous entries.
Here's what AMD's internal results showed, running all six games at 1080p under max settings with a Radeon RX 480:
You can see that in two of the newer sequels, the RX 480 no longer maintains 60 FPS. That's to be expected as game engines evolve and developers learn how to increase the amount of eyecandy across the board.
You'll also notice that AMD tries to be clever with the chart by using 2015 versus 2018. Polaris launched in 2016 so in reality we're only talking about a 2.5 year difference. While that's not really a parlor trick, well, it is a marketing trick.
Still, encouraging gamers to finally upgrade their GPU after 2.5 years isn't an unreasonable request to make for a company in the business of selling graphics cards.
But what if you've been contemplating another midrange GPU like Nvidia's GTX 1060?
#2: RX 590 > GTX 1060?
Nvidia's GTX 1060 is one hell of a card, and it's typically traded blows with AMD's Radeon RX 580 (but of course trumps it in power efficiency). Now AMD has an offering that colors in the $150 price gap between the Vega 56 and RX 580. On the competitive side, it should also fall somewhere between the GTX 1060 and GTX 1070.
To illustrate that point, AMD ran a few internal benchmarks with the Sapphire Nitro RX 590 versus the Asus Strix GTX 1060 (6GB) at 1080p max settings:
These are notable performance differences, especially for players wanting an uncompromising 60 FPS experience.
AMD's RX 590 Reviewer's Guide expands the benchmarks to 16 titles, with the RX 590 claiming victory in all but two of them (GTA V and Assassin's Creed Odyssey).
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