AMD Radeon RX 590 1440p, 1080p & Ultrawide Gaming Performance

[PAGETITLE=A Look At Radeon RX 590 & Our Test Suite][Top Ad] Here's a product I never thought would exist: AMD's Radeon RX 590. Sure, the card has been floating around the rumor mill for a while, but remember when an NVIDIA GeForce card based on Volta also was? Sometimes, rumors just fall flat. And given that the Polaris architecture has already been stretched so much with the RX 500 series, I personally never expected to see a 590. As much as I never expected this product to exist, though, it doesn't mean that it shouldn't. This is in effect a clock-boosted product (RX 570~590 comparison here), but it's honestly a great clock boost, and does manage to separate the 590 from the 580 a good amount overall. AMD is suggesting pricing of $279 USD for its RX 590, which competes closest with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060, which has models for $250~$290 on Amazon. The RX 580 goes for about $250 on average, but can currently be found on sale for a mere $199 on Amazon (more on this in the final thoughts). So how does AMD manage to crank an already nicely clocked RX 580 to 11 with another 200 or so MHz? Well, the transition to a 12nm process sure can't hurt, and while that isn't likely the sole reason for the boost, it makes me really want to see RX Vega built on a smaller process. That tasty new 7nm from TSMC that AMD has been trialing can't get here quick enough. AMD handled full sampling for the RX 590, so I can only imagine that I was chosen to receive a "Fatboy" model for an obvious reason - one that has nothing to do with Harley-Davidson. The reason for the card to be called Fatboy is because it takes up more than 2 slots, but only slightly. I personally do not think this is justified for a mid-range product, but I'm not going to judge when the GPU can hit 78°C with ease as-is. Aside from the reminder that I need to purge some pounds, XFX's Fatboy can take advantage of Radeon Chill, to run super-quiet when the load is not that great, includes a backplate for improved heat dissipation, and has a dual-BIOS for those who like to get crafty with their gear. The card is also said to be overclockable (by XFX), but that's testing I skipped since I had to catch up on 1080p benchmarks for this article (since I had none from the last suite update). AMD's Radeon Gaming GPU Lineup Cores Base MHz Peak FP32 Memory Bandwidth TDP Price Vega 64 4096 1546 12.6 TFLOPS 8 GB 4 484 GB/s 295W $499 Vega 56 3584 1471 10.5 TFLOPS 8 GB 4 410 GB/s 210W $449 RX 590 2304 1576 7.1 TFLOPS 8 GB 3 256 GB/s 225W $279 RX 580 2304 1340 6.1 TFLOPS 8 GB 3 256 GB/s 185W $229 RX 570 2048 1244 5.1 TFLOPS 8 GB 3 224 GB/s 150W $179 RX 560 896 1175 2.6 TFLOPS 4 GB 3 112 GB/s 80W $119 RX 550 640 1183 1.2 TFLOPS 2 GB 3 112 GB/s 50W $99 Notes 1 GDDR6; 2 GDDR5X; 3 GDDR5; 4 HBM2 Architecture: RX 550~590 = Polaris; RX Vega 56 & 64 = Vega When PowerColor decided to leak the RX 590 earlier this week, its website reported on a 17% performance boost. The RX 590 is rated at 7.1 TFLOPS by AMD, which gives us about a 16% boost over the RX 580. I'd tell you if that proves true right here if I didn't have a couple of pages ahead I wanted you to actually look at. But, you can probably take an accurate guess if you don't feel like clicking ahead. There is really not too much else to say, so let's get going: A Look At Test Methodology. Techgage Gaming GPU Test PC Processor Intel Core i7-8700K (3.7GHz, 6C/12T) Motherboard EVGA Z370 FTW CPU tested with BIOS 1.09 (August 20, 2018) Memory G.SKILL TridentZ (F4-3400C16-8GSXW) 8GB x 2 Operates at DDR4-3400 16-16-16 (1.35V) AMD Graphics AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 (8GB; Radeon 18.8.2) AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 (8GB; Radeon 18.8.2 + Nov 14) AMD Radeon RX 590 (8GB; Radeon Nov 14) AMD Radeon RX 580 (8GB; Radeon 18.8.2 + Nov 14) AMD Radeon RX 570 (4GB; Radeon 18.8.2 + Nov 14) AMD Radeon RX 550 (2GB; Radeon 18.8.2) NVIDIA Graphics NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (11GB; GeForce 411.51) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 (8GB; GeForce 411.51) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 (8GB; GeForce 416.34) NVIDIA TITAN Xp (12GB; GeForce 399.07) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (11GB; GeForce 399.07) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (8GB; GeForce 399.07) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti (8GB; GeForce 399.07) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB; GeForce 399.07 + 416.34) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB; GeForce 399.07 + 416.34) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (4GB; GeForce 399.07) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 (2GB; GeForce 399.07) Storage Kingston SSDNow V310 960GB (SATA 6Gbps) Power Supply Corsair RM650x (650W) Chassis NZXT S340 Elite Mid-tower Cooling Corsair Hydro H100i V2 AIO Liquid Cooler (240mm) Et cetera Windows 10 Pro (64-bit; build 17134) Since 1080p testing hadn't been conducted at all since the last test machine overhaul a few months ago (which will soon be overhauled again with the i9-9900K), the GTX 1060, GTX 1070, RX 570, RX 580, RX 590, and Vega 56 were tested with the latest driver only at that resolution. While 399.07 to 416.34 seems like a mammoth jump, it actually represents only two months of driver releases. Games Tested & Vendor Neutrality. A total of eight games are included in our current test suite. Some have appeared here before, while others make their first appearance: Monster World Hunter, Fortnite, and F1 2018. I had planned to include PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds as a ninth title, but the results were too sporadic to inspire any sort of confidence (an issue not seen in Fortnite, by comparison). Here's the full list of tested games and developer allegiances, as well as synthetic tests also used: Battlefield 1 Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - AMD partner F1 2018 Far Cry 5 - AMD partner Fortnite Monster Hunter World Rise of the Tomb Raider - NVIDIA partner Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands - NVIDIA partner UL 3DMark & VRMark Unigine Superposition This article is going to be the last for this particular suite, as some games are now on the market that should be slipped in here. Battlefield 1 will be replaced with Battlefield V, and Rise of the Tomb Raider will be replaced with Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I might also drop Fortnite since there hasn't been much demand, and it's a time-consuming chore to test (a built-in benchmark for online games would be great). For our apples-to-apples testing, the graphics settings seen above apply to every one of our tested resolutions so as to deliver standard apples-to-apples results. In most cases, each configuration is tested twice, with more runs added if the initial results make the extra testing necessary (which is actually rare, even with manual runs). Fortnite is the only game tested three times by default due to its variable nature. While it is not at all targeted at the resolution, I ran the RX 590 through 3440x1440 tests since it was easy to do, and I wanted to see if it was possible to get any reasonable framerates out of the wider 1440p resolution. 4K has about 70% more pixels than 3440x1440, so... don't count on RX 590 being too useful there. Ideally, the more modest ultrawide resolution of 2560x1080 would have been tested, but time unfortunately didn't allow it. Similarly, I also tested the Vega 56 at 1080p only because I saw some comments around the web requesting the comparison. Apparently, Vega 56 can sometimes drop to nearly $300 (though I have not yet seen it), so if you ever find a blockbuster deal like that, you don't even think about it - you just splurge the extra, and forget about the RX 590. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Battlefield 1, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, F1 2018 & Far Cry 5] Battlefield 1. The higher the resolution, the smaller the gains the RX 590 will exhibit over the RX 580. At 1080p, AMD's latest gains 7 FPS, which drops to a gain of 5 FPS at 1440p. As I analyze these results, I now realize that I didn't test the GTX 1060 in the higher resolutions, so I'm glad it's at least covered in the 1080p set. AMD really cleans house at 1080p, though, slotting the three RX cards right in between the 1060 and 1070. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. The RX 590 continues to leap ahead of the RX 580 by a fairly expected amount, again sitting in front of NVIDIA's GTX 1060 - and not at all far behind the GTX 1070. At 1440p, the RX 590 with our settings can handle about 50 FPS, which isn't bad at all given the level of detail. However, that consists of a 40 FPS minimum, which might be a bit low for your tastes. Fortunately, Mankind Divided offers a ton of tweaking ability, so you won't have a hard time getting a 10 FPS boost. F1 2018. In F1 2018, the GTX 1060 manages to overtake the RX 570 at 1080p, and once again, the RX 590 slots in ahead of the RX 580 with a 7 FPS increase. While Mankind Divided had tight performance between the RX 590 and GTX 1070, the latter card clearly spreads its wings better here (and with Battlefield 1, but we have many more benchmarks to go). Far Cry 5. These 7 FPS increases for the RX 590 at 1080p over the RX 580 seem to be rather consistent. Yet again, the GTX 1060 displaces the positioning of the RX 570, after which point the cards scale as expected. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Fortnite, Monster Hunter, RotTR & Ghost Recon Wildlands] Fortnite. To the surprise of no one, I'm sure, the RX 590 can handle Fortnite just fine at 1080p. And 1440p, for that matter. Though if you are insistent on higher than 60 FPS in your online shooters, you can easily drop the detail levels down and gain an instant boost. Interestingly, this is the first test where the delta between the RX 580 and 590 is quite small - a mere 3 FPS. Due to the nature of an online game, it's difficult to get tight performance deltas from run to run. With mega-popular games like these, it'd be nice if the developer could cough up a worthwhile in-game benchmark that actually allows true apples-to-apples testing. That said, Fortnite is actually pretty consistent, all things considered, whereas PUBG in my experience has been anything but. 20 FPS deltas from run to run in that game were common, which is why it isn't used in this lineup. That tangent aside, this is the first example of a...

AMD Radeon RX 590 1440p, 1080p & Ultrawide Gaming Performance

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Rob Williams