Sapphire Radeon Nitro+ RX 590 8GB
Look who’s back, back again
YOU KNOW WHAT we don’t like doing? We don’t like reviewing the same product over and over and over again. The RX 480 was a fantastic breath of fresh air from AMD when it arrived. It showed promise. A mid-range GPU with enough clout to take on the 1080p battleground, no sweat, and at an affordable price, too. OK, it may have drawn perhaps a touch too much power from the PCIe bus at first, but that had little effect on premium motherboards anyway. It was an exceptionally strong GPU.
Fast-forward a year, and we saw AMD’s first ever like-for-like rebadge, the RX 580. With Vega not having dropped yet either, the future didn’t look good. And, lo and behold, it wasn’t. Usually, a brand new top-tier architecture, like Vega, would populate the top two cards of a series, with the preceding architectures shimmying down the chain by one numerical designation each to fill in the gaps. A 380 would become a 470, a 480 would become a 570, you get the picture. In this case, though, nope. The RX 480 became the RX 580, with slightly higher clocks and power draw.
So, what’s the RX 590? A new GPU? Nope. A new architecture? Nope. More transistors? Nope. Better performance? Marginally. Better price? Sort of. What’s the point? Good question. We’re not too sure. This is essentially a 12nm variant of the RX 480, a card that launched over two years ago, with 10 percent higher clocks. It’s frustrating. Still, we gave AMD the benefit of the doubt, and listened to its marketing spiel. This time around, it’s all about capitalizing on that 1080p market. Yup, according to AMD’s research, 60 percent of gamers game at 1080p. That’s a big portion. Because of that untapped potential, AMD decided in its wisdom that the time was right for an ever-so-slightly better GPU to enter the market, taking advantage of a 12nm Polaris architecture. You know, the same architecture that already targeted this market two years ago, but with a few extra frames. MISSING MARKET There’s a problem with this. If 60 percent of the market is already gaming at 1080p, they probably already have a suitable setup. Especially as it’s a resolution that’s been comfortably accessible by mainstream gamers for well over a decade now. Hell, even if we ignore the massive market share Nvidia currently has, and just look at AMD’s offerings over the last three years, the number of cards aimed at 1080p is a total of four—now five with the 590. Include Nvidia’s GTX 1050 Ti, 1060, and upcoming 2060, and, well, you get the point.
That aside, the RX 590 does perform well at 1080p. and both scored in the mid-40s range, with and
raising that up to the 70–80
still frames-per-second mark. It’s a solid 1080p card. If nothing else, AMD has certainly achieved what it set out to do—a commendable effort.
Temperatures are well within acceptable parameters in our 21 C office, and the card is quiet overall. Sapphire has done a great job with the cooling on this card. The color scheme, however, leaves a lot to be desired. In a world of RGB and color-neutral cards, having a baby-blue GPU just doesn’t fit with any of the systems out there today.
Where does all that leave us? With a slightly higher clocked card that performs slightly better than a “flagship” mid-range GPU that AMD launched over two years ago. It’s not enough. We need a viable, competitive solution, to really take the fight to Nvidia, not just sit there wagging its tail and enjoying dominance in the world of consoles. It might as well be a monopoly otherwise. Come on, AMD, pick up the slack!