Sapphire Nitro Radeon RX 570
Another new Radeon that’s not really ‘new’.
We’ve found ourselves questioning whether the Sapphire Nitro RX 570 — or Radeon RX 570 GPUs in general — represents a worthy sequel to the RX 470. In other words, is this The Empire Strikes Back or The Phantom Menace? Unlike in the movies, however, that ultimately turned out to be a tough question to answer, and will largely depend on how you feel about the practice of rebranding GPUs.
The Radeon RX 580 is the RX 570’s sibling — which is found at the heart of this Sapphire card — and is also a rebranded product, taking the previous-gen Radeon RX 470 and bumping up clock speeds a bit to deliver a performance increase. In the Radeon RX 570’s case, however, it’s thankfully a bit more than that.
Utilising a tweaked Polaris architecture built on a refined 14nm FinFET process, the 570 can deliver reduced power consumption thanks to tweaked power management. This introduces a third ‘mid-tier’ power state, which sits between the maximum and minimum memory power states available on the 470. That should provide more efficient power use in scenarios associated with multi-monitor setups, multimedia playback and when systems are idle.
Also brought to the table with the RX 500 series is the new ‘Radeon Chill’ feature, which aims to be an innovative way to reduce GPU power consumption and create more options for energy-conscious gamers. The Chill feature can be easily enabled or disabled via AMD’s driver software and has launched with a sizeable list of supported titles, including the eSports staples of CS:GO, League of Legends and Dota 2.
It has a couple of ways of working. The first is by effectively reducing the rate of frame processing — and therefore delivery — by the GPU when the user is in-game but in an idle-type scenario (such as, standing by in an MMO save zone with little occurring on screen), and then increasing the frame rate when the user becomes active once again. Additionally, in older games like CS:GO, which are easily driven by modern GPUs, Radeon Chill can cap excessively high frame rates, thereby further reducing power consumption by the GPU.
For real-world gaming assessment, we monitored performance in Far Cry Primal (DX11), For Honor (DX11) and The Division (DX12) at 1080p with the visual eye candy turned up. Sapphire’s Nitro RX 570 delivered average frame rates just shy of the 60fps marker, the typical goal for a smooth gaming experience for the average user.
For the price, at 1080p, the Sapphire Nitro RX 570 delivers fair performance, so if you’re looking to upgrade from a GPU that’s a few generations behind, this’ll give you a newer feature set and won’t break the bank. But it’s worth remembering that the GeForce GTX 1060 is at play to in a comparable price bracket — and can even be found a little cheaper — and in many games offers fractionally better speeds.