Sapphire Radeon RX 580 Nitro+
Revamped, reclocked, rebadged
OH AMD, AMD, AMD. Why do you do this to us? You fight, and you riot, and you revolutionize the processor industry, then you tease us with a brand new graphics card, only for it to be little more than a rebadge. Let’s cut straight to it: This is not a brand new architecture. In fact, there’s very little new about the Radeon RX 580 at all. The launch of this new GPU came with little fanfare, and with good reason: It’s not Vega.
In short, moving from the RX 480 to the 580 provides nothing more than a slight overclock to the base card. Indeed, you could achieve the same results by bumping up the power target to 110 percent, and moving that clock frequency slightly higher. So why do it? Good question. In short, we can only guess it’s down to improvements in the manufacturing process. Rumors abound—we know that GlobalFoundries (the crew that manufactures AMD’s GPUs and CPUs) uses Samsung’s 14nm LPE (standing for low power early, this is Samsung’s second iteration on its 14nm manufacturing process) technology in its 400 series cards. It’s possible that with the RX 500 series, GloFo is using Samsung’s (newly announced) 14nm LPU tech instead, improving power efficiency and clock speeds in the process. Which may explain the additional 30W TDP included on this card, and the slightly higher clocks.
That aside, it’s the nomenclature that gets us. Traditionally, with every new series of cards, you get one or two rebadges. For instance, a 380 becomes a 470, a 370 becomes a 460, and so on. Dropping the price point, and improving power efficiency in the process, is great for the consumer, because cards with substantial performance, coming in at an incredible cost, suddenly become more affordable.
The 580, on the other hand, has missed that beat. The RX 480 has migrated across to the 580. This would make sense if AMD were about to embark upon a new naming scheme, or even if it were to launch two new flagships with these rebadges, but that’s simply not the case. So what’s going on? If anything, these two cards should have been renamed the 485 and the 475. Especially when you include the lack of any reference variants.
Right, enough grumbling, how does it look from a performance perspective? Well, we have to make it clear that our RX 580 sample was the Sapphire Nitro+ preoverclocked version, compared to our stock RX 480. Generally speaking, in game we saw an increase of around 10 percent across our titles at 1080p. Going from 61fps in FarCryPrimal to 66fps, 58fps to 67fps in TheDivision, and 34fps to 40fps in Rise oftheTombRaider. Fairly impressive for a GPU that is essentially just a rehash.
Who is this card aimed at? In short, anyone who still hasn’t upgraded from AMD’s R9 300 series, or the lower end of Nvidia’s GTX 900 series. It’s a rehash of an already well-manufactured, wellpriced graphics architecture, bringing that price-to-performance heritage forward into 2017. In fact, price-to-performancewise, it’s actually in a bit of a sweet spot. It doesn’t quite wipe Nvidia’s GTX 1060 3GB off the top of the 1080p hill just yet, but it’s close. And with that extra performance? It’s damn tempting, to say the least. Couple it with a decent FreeSync 1080p monitor, and you’ll be on to a winner.
There’s been no official announcement from AMD yet as to when Vega may be launching, although rumors abound that it could be any time within the next few months. In fact, by the time you read this, Computex should be over, and those rumors will hopefully become fact. Until then, you might want to hold off on those big GPU splurges.