AMD Radeon RX 590 Built on 12nm FinFET Process, Benchmarked in Final Fantasy XV

[crazyeyesreaper]

Thanks to some photographs by Andreas Schilling, of HardwareLuxx, it is now confirmed that AMD's Radeon RX 590 will make use of the 12 nm FinFET process. The change from 14 nm to 12 nm FinFET for the RX 590 brings with it the possibility of both higher clock speeds and better power efficiency. That said, considering it is based on the same Polaris architecture used in the Radeon RX 580 and 570, it remains to be seen how it will impact AMDs pricing in regards to the product stack. Will there be a price drop to compensate, or will the RX 590 be more expensive? Since AMD has already made things confusing enough with its cut down 2048SP version of RX 580 in China, anything goes at this point.




Thanks to the Final Fantasy XV Benchmark being updated with results for the RX 590, we at least have an idea as to the performance on offer. In the 2560x1440 resolution tests, performance has improved by roughly 10% compared to the RX 580. Looking at the 3840x2160 resolution results shows a performance improvement of roughly 10 to 15%. This uplift in performance allows the RX 590 to put some serious pressure on NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB. Keep in mind that while the RX 580 was always close, AMD's latest Polaris offering eliminates the gap and is far more competitive in a title that has always favored its competition, at least when it comes to comparing reference cards.





When manual overclocking is taken into account, AMD's RX 580 can typically see a performance increase of around 5 to 10%. While this is speculation, in theory, it would put it on par or very near the RX 590 in terms of performance. However, no overclock is guaranteed so keeping that in mind, the move to the 12 nm FinFET process delivers a guaranteed performance boost with the possibility of further overclocking headroom. This should allow the RX 590 to further increase its performance advantage over the RX 580 and 570. Only time will tell how things shake out, but at the very least users can expect the AMD Radeon RX 590 to deliver on average 10% more performance over the current crop of RX 580 graphics cards.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[xkm1948]

re-rebrandeon

 

[noel_fs]

And price? I bought a second hand 580 for 170, hmmm

 

[XiGMAKiD]

re-rebrandeon

Coming from Rebrand Technologies Group

 

[eidairaman1]

Ok to shrink an existing arch by 2 nm yields, 10-15% performance increase due to clock speed and power draw being slightly less.

So no reconfiguring the arch. This takes confusion out of the cards unlike greens crippled versions.

 

[EntropyZ]

Depending on the price, this card could make new retail Vega cards almost a bad choice for the average gamer. Its extremely rare when there's a game that can utilize the raw compute power of Vega. A select few can actually make Polaris/Vega overtake a Pascal equivalent. So there is a chance that in time those cards might become a better buy overall, I mean the RX 580 already is if you are considering using Freesync...

But used a used 56 can be had for a pretty good price now.

I don't regret getting a 1070, but I have a Freesync monitor and I can't use what is already there, it's just not enabled. One of the cons, I had to look over which still haunt me. The state of the market had forced me to pick what was best at the time. Now I wish I had a 56 because I cannot find benchmarks with newer drivers for some older titles which typically favored Pascal, but OC'ing only bring single digit improvements. Maybe Polaris/Vega is overall better right now, it's been ages since launch.

I wouldn't mind a side-grade, but only if I knew for sure I was going to happy with the switch, I got burned with the R9 300 series before. With new Vega cards being rumored, most should probably hold-off on an upgrade until RTG shows what they have next.

 

[Jism]

AMD has a contract with glofo or some shit, that it needs to take off current chips. Their fabline adapted to the 12NM proces and it's not really a rebrand. Well it is but not one AMD instigated for i would say. As with performance, this could only come with additional clockspeed increase. Since the 12nm is a better refinement, it would proberly be sitting at 1500Mhz with a TDP of approx 180W as the RX580 does. The RX580 on the other hands blows 200 to 220W of power when running on 1500Mhz.

Most gains when oc'ing was actually increasing the memory timings, and not clockspeeds. I.e straps of 1750Mhz applied on 2000Mhz and look for additional headroom when overclocking memory. This combined would give a nice increase but proberly not near close the 1070. The RX580 is a good mid range card but a Vega 56 is a better choice anyway.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

Ok to shrink an existing arch by 2 nm yields, 10-15% performance increase due to clock speed and power draw being slightly less.

So no reconfiguring the arch. This takes confusion out of the cards unlike greens crippled versions.

Never heard of rebrands with a die shrink. The numbers look good, compared to the 1060 inbreeding. That was the idea behind this card, was it not?

 

[ShurikN]

It will be interesting to see how much have clocks improved with the new process. The leaked 3DMark snapshot had 1545MHz, compared to the base clock speed of the 580 which should be 1256.
Also interested to see how much performance/W improved on 12nm.

 

[eidairaman1]

Never heard of rebrands with a die shrink. The numbers look good, compared to the 1060 inbreeding. That was the idea behind this card, was it not?

To gain a lead yes.

 

[carex]

Coming from Rebrand Technologies Group

hahaha

It will be interesting to see how much have clocks improved with the new process. The leaked 3DMark snapshot had 1545MHz, compared to the base clock speed of the 580 which should be 1256.
Also interested to see how much performance/W improved on 12nm.

exactly around 7.5%

 

[kastriot]

Naming is wrong they should name it 580X.

 

[cucker tarlson]

I told you it's gonna be 590. Misleading naming again. But it's good they're releasing it, though just 7.5% increase is pretty measly,it technically makes it faster than 1060, but it's just a placeholder for Navi really and still very much nothing special as far as competing in the mid-range goes. Tell me when a $300 card can outperform the 1070.
It's techically not a rebrand, but it very much feels that way, this is 480/580 with just a very minor die shrink. As for power savings, do you really think they can bump clocks and save a noticeable amounts of power at the same time going from 14 to 12 ?

 

[Jism]

I told you it's gonna be 590. Misleading naming again. But it's good they're releasing it, though just 7.5% increase is pretty measly,it technically makes it faster than 1060, but it's just a placeholder for Navi really and still very much nothing special as far as competing in the mid-range goes. Tell me when a $300 card can outperform the 1070.
It's techically not a rebrand, but it very much feels that way, this is 480/580 with just a very minor die shrink. As for power savings, do you really think they can bump clocks and save a noticeable amounts of power at the same time going from 14 to 12 ?

Depends on what the real improvement on 12NM is compared to 14NM. If we're looking at the RX580 it's a 180W power enveloppe. So in order to archieve that same enveloppe with clocks of approx 1500Mhz it's only a 120Mhz increase. Perhaps AMD does a better job at binning now and the chips actually require a lower voltage compared to the RX580 which needed 1150mv in general. I can get mines working on 1090Mv and shaves off a few watts here and there on full load.

Lets await benches and OC results. We know that AMD already pushes the chips pretty much beyond. There is not much high OC headroom without giving into huge power requirements. (i.e Vega 56 on 400Watts / 1700Mhz core)

 

[ShurikN]

exactly around 7.5%

So it's both exactly and around

 

[Mistral]

I told you it's gonna be 590. Misleading naming again. But it's good they're releasing it, though just 7.5% increase is pretty measly,it technically makes it faster than 1060, but it's just a placeholder for Navi really and still very much nothing special as far as competing in the mid-range goes. Tell me when a $300 card can outperform the 1070.

The 580 is already faster than the 1060. But yeah, the 590 would need to hit well over 1700GHz to beat a 1070... and that's not happening.

 

[Valantar]

A refresh with increased performance is always nice, but I'm very wary that this will come with an added cost as well, which... well, isn't really acceptable. The entirely broken current GPU market notwithstanding, the 480/580 4/8GB launched at $200/230 several years ago. Sure, DRAM prices have increased significantly since then, but if this launches above $200, I'll be very disappointed. The fact that they're naming it 590 instead of 580+ or something (580X would be consistent, but a bit too many X-es in one name) makes me worried that they'll be pricing this at a premium. Hardware refresh cycles extending as process improvements slow is unavoidable, and as such we can't keep expecting the dramatic perf/$ drops year over year that we've been used to - but paying more for a 10% increase several years down the line is still not good enough. This needs to be at $200 MSRP. Period.

 

[Kamgusta]

You can't have too much of an improvement on just a minor die shrink (the 12nm it's not a full node shrink).
If they chose to raise the clocks, you can't also expect lower power consumption. It will be the same of RX580.
Expect the same price of the RX580 (or a bit higher). They have no reasons to lower it (it's already lower than GTX1060's one).
Remaining RX580s will be discounted, of course. Good luck in finding one (they are waiting for supplies to end before introducing this RX590).
And that's all for 2018's AMD VGAs.

 

[Fabio]

Coming from Rebrand Technologies Group

RMD, Rebranded Micro Device

 

[Freez]

Naming is wrong they should name it 580X.

You mean Radeon 580 PRO?

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

RMD, Rebranded Micro Device

You mean Radeon 580 PRO?

You mean Radeon 580 Ti

 

[Valantar]

You mean Radeon 580 Ti

Radeon RX xXx580xXx TI GTX Ultra OC Gaming Xtra Xtreme Xtended Director's Cut.

 

[ShurikN]

580 XT, just like in the old days

 

[rtwjunkie]

I don’t really see a die shrink as a rebrand. Yes the name sucks, but that alone doesn’t dictate any level of suckage. If the FF benchmark is to be believed, this could put AMD atop the middle tier. That’s not a bad place to be, assuming there is anybody left to buy this as an upgrade.

 

[Aquinus]

Am I the only person who finds it weird that the graphs show the Vega 56 being faster than the Vega 64? Don't get me wrong, if this has Vega 56/64 performance then that's great but, the numbers look weird to me.