AMD Radeon RX 590 preview - refreshingly solid at 1080p
AMD's latest card has been revealed. The Radeon RX 590 is the first AMD card produced using a 12nm process, allowing the card to reach significantly faster clock speeds than the 14nm RX 580. However, that does come at a cost in the form of a 40W jump in power consumption and a higher price: $279 for the RX 590, versus $229 for the RX 580. In this preview, we'll show you how the new RX 590 performs against its closest competitors ahead of our full DF review.
The RX 590 is intended to slot between the RX 580 and Vega 56 on AMD's totem pole, thereby achieving strong 1080p performance with a little more headroom to play at max settings or chase high frame-rates without the extra cost and features of AMD's Vega chips. We should also expect 1440p performance to be improved, although even the best RX 580 models only managed console-quality frame-rates in the most demanding titles. In terms of Nvidia's GPU lineup, the RX 590 ought to offer faster performance than the GTX 1060 6GB without challenging the significantly more expensive GTX 1070.
So what exactly is the difference between the RX 590 and RX 580? In truth, there's not a lot to separate them. While the 12nm process allows the RX 590 to run at higher frequencies than the RX 580 (1545MHz compared to 1340MHz), the two cards share the same number of compute units, shaders, memory and more. The only difference is that these higher frequencies require more power, with the new card's TDP has grown from 185W to 225W. It's clear that AMD were aiming to make a new card with a minimal investment of time and resources, and boosting frequencies while leaving the overall design the same is a very efficient way to do just that.
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