The AMD Radeon RX 590 is a great midrange graphics card, delivering good performance, overclocking, and value.
The best graphics card is rarely the most expensive model. Yes, Nvidia holds the crown for the extreme performance market, and the high-end market as well, but one look at the Steam Hardware Survey tells a well-known truth: The majority of gamers are using midrange or lower graphics cards. The top four GPUs are all midrange parts costing less than $300, and they account for more than 35 percent of the market. The GTX 1070 comes in fifth at around 4 percent market share, and the 1080 Ti only accounts for 1.5 percent of users. With nearly a $200 gap between the RX 580 and RX Vega 56 (less now thanks to some sales), AMD hopes to fill the void with a new $279 RX 590.
Radeon RX 590 Specifications
Architecture: Polaris 30 Lithography: TSMC 12nm FinFET Transistor Count: 5.7 billion Die Size: 232mm2 Compute Units: 36 CUDA Cores: 2,304 Render Outputs: 32 Texture Units: 144 Base Clock: 1469MHz Boost Clock: 1545MHz Memory Speed: 8 GT/s GDDR5 Capacity: 8GB Bus Width: 256-bit TDP: 175W
This isn’t just a rehash of the previous Polaris GPUs like the RX 570/580 (which were a rehash of the RX 470/480). The new RX 590 GPU uses TSMC’s enhanced 12nm process. That leads to lower power and higher clockspeeds, which is good news. But AMD didn’t do a die shrink with the 590—transistor counts and die size are the same, so really it’s about improving thermals and efficiency. There’s also no 4GB model to muddy the waters this round, which is just as well considering how poorly 4GB and lower GPUs are holding up with higher quality settings in the latest games.
Looking at the RX 580 8GB for comparison, the main difference is that the 590 has a turbo clock of 1545MHz, compared to 1340MHz. Nominal power is rated at 175W TDP, though actual TDP will vary by the graphics card manufacturer. AMD sent us the XFX RX 590 Fatboy for the launch, as it won’t be providing any ‚reference‘ models. The XFX card comes with a slight factory overclock of 1580MHz, which should be typical of most custom AIB models.
Still, it’s hard not to be a bit disappointed at the outset. A 200MHz boost in clockspeeds is welcome news, but we’re looking at an architecture that’s over two years old. A straight process shrink is about the easiest update to any microprocessor that can be done, and some would argue that Nvidia would have been better off releasing a less expensive Pascal update than the new GeForce RTX line. Personally, I’d rather see larger changes, but RX 590 and the Polaris 30 architecture are all we’re getting for now. (Where’s the 7nm love? Hopefully coming in early to mid 2019.)
As far as competition goes, right now Nvidia has left a gaping hole in its lineup. The RTX 2070 sits at $499, and the GTX 1080 is being phased out. I’m not sure if the GTX 1070 and 1070 Ti will stick around much longer, but right now they start at around $350 (after mail-in rebate). The next step down in pricing is a rather large drop, with the cheapest GTX 1060 6GB sitting at $230. Considering the RX 580 8GB already typically beats the GTX 1060 6GB, at least from the performance perspective, this should be an easy win for AMD. I expect Nvidia will have an answer with a new midrange GPU sometime in early to mid 2019—though it’s still not clear if that will be an RTX 2060, maybe a GTX 2060, or something else.
If AMD were only going up against the GTX 1060 6GB, the RX 590 would look a lot better. The problem is there are a lot of RX 580 8GB cards still available, and at all-time low prices thanks to the end of the cryptocurrency fever. Multiple cards are available for $200, which is bad news for the RX 590. It’s faster, but it’s also $80 more expensive, at least going by MSRP. But AMD has something to sweeten the deal, and depending on your taste in games, it’s pretty darn good.
The initial RX 590 cards (at participating retailers) will come with a coupon for three free games—highly anticipated games for many, though none of the games are out yet. You’ll get codes for the Resident Evil 2 remake (slated to launch January 25,2019), The Division 2 (March 15,2019), and Devil May Cry 5 (March 8,2019). It’s a bit of an odd bundle with the games all several months or more from release, but at least you won’t already own them. Whether or not they’re any good remains to be seen, but it’s potentially $150-$180 in added value—one of the best gaming bundles we’ve seen in several years.
With no architectural changes to discuss—you can read about the Polaris architecture in our RX 480 launch review —let’s move on to performance. AMD’s GCN architectures have proven better at DirectX 12 games for the most part, but often come up short in DX11 games. Our current test suite includes six DX12 titles, seven DX11 games, and one Vulkan game. All GPUs are tested with the ‚best‘ API, which means DX12 for AMD, but DX11 in a few cases (specifically Total War: Warhammer 2) for Nvidia.
Radeon RX 590 performance
PC GAMER GPU TESTBED
Intel Core i7-8700K @ 5.0GHz NZXT Kraken X62 Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 7 2x8GB G. Skill TridentZ RGB DDR4-3200 Samsung 970 Evo 1TB Samsung 860 Evo 4TB EVGA SuperNova P2 1000W Corsair Carbide Air 740
Something I’ve been trying to do with GPU launches of late is to check out overclocking potential. My experience with the RX 580/570 and RX 480/470 was relatively unimpressive for overclocking, but the RX 590 did okay. I managed a fully stable 1650MHz overclock on the GPU core (only 4.4 percent more than the XFX factory OC), but the GDDR5 I was able to max out the slider in MSI Afterburner at 9GT/s. I did have to increase GPU fan speeds a bit, but ended up with a peak of 75C during my full test suite and fan speed of around 60 percent. I’ll include both ’stock‘ (factory overclocked) and manual overclocking results for the 590 in the charts.
Overclocking did increase system power use by around 50W while gaming. At stock, MSI Afterburner reports about 150W for the RX 590, while power at the outlet for the entire PC measures 320-340W. With the overclock in place, power jumps to around 370-400W for the entire PC. A GTX 1060 6GB by comparison has a system power draw while gaming of 250-270W.
I retested all graphics cards for Nvidia’s Turing launch, plus added a couple of new games since then. The new games were tested with the latest drivers available at the time, while the RX 590 uses AMD provided „18.40“ drivers that should be similar in most respects to the current Adrenalin Edition 18.11.1 public drivers. The test PC uses a Core i7-8700K overclocked to 5.0GHz to help minimize CPU bottlenecks during testing, along with other high-end components.
Along with 1080p medium testing, I’m using ‚maxed out‘ settings in 14 popular games for my primary benchmarks. That includes all the extras under GTA 5’s advanced graphics menu (other than superscaling), HBAO+ in The Witcher 3, and so on. Some games punish cards with less than 6GB or even 8GB of VRAM at these settings, but the RX 590 and GTX 1060 6GB (along with higher end GPUs like the Vega 56 and GTX 1070) should be fine. The sweet spot for the RX 590 is definitely 1080p, typically at ultra quality. 1440p is often playable as well, perhaps with a step down on a few settings, while 4k users clearly aren’t the intended audience.
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Starting with 1080p at both medium and ‚ultra‘ settings, the RX 590 looks great. It’s about 10 percent faster than a GTX 1060 6GB at 1080p, and likewise 10 percent faster than the RX 580 8GB.
