Introduction

AMD today announced its Radeon RX 590 graphics card. This is an unexpected product launch given the current competitive environment, and nobody expected something new from AMD until 2019. The Radeon RX 590 is designed for the vast majority of PC gamers who still play at Full HD (1080p) resolution and is priced under $300. With a number of AAA game launches lined up for the holiday, AMD is going after the crowd that's either upgrading or gifting a graphics card for gameplay at 1080p with all details maxed out in every game. Rival NVIDIA hasn't managed to address this segment with its RTX "Turing" architecture yet, and there is a big price-performance gap between its "Pascal" GeForce GTX 1060 and $360 GTX 1070, which AMD is targeting with the RX 590.

The Radeon RX 590 packs none of the exotic HBM tech from its RX Vega siblings and uses existing GDDR5 memory, which has AMD and its partners enjoy more headroom in which to adjust prices. It is based on the "Polaris 30" silicon, which is essentially a "Polaris 10" die built on the latest 12 nm FinFET node at GlobalFoundries, yielding significant energy-efficiency dividends AMD is cashing in on to increase clock speeds by 15 percent. The engine clock has been dialed up to 1545 MHz, compared to the 1340 MHz of the RX 580.



Unlike the RX 580, the new RX 590 only comes with 8 GB of video memory (no 4 GB variant), and the card's memory setup is unchanged: 8 Gbps GDDR5 over a 256-bit wide memory interface, which yields 256 GB/s of bandwidth. The "Polaris 30" silicon features the same core-configuration as its predecessors, with 2,304 stream processors spread across 36 compute units, 144 TMUs, and 32 ROPs. There's still no ray-tracing machinery to rival RTX, or other new features.

The Radeon RX 590 launch is completely board-partner driven, and there is no reference-design card. In this review, we're taking a look at the XFX Radeon RX 590 Fatboy. This card features a PCB that closely resembles AMD's reference design "Polaris" PCB, mated with an aluminium fin-stack cooler that's ventilated by a pair of fans. The card draws power from an 8-pin and a 6-pin PCIe power connector. There's also a factory overclock on tap, which has the XFX RX 590 Fatboy running at 1580 MHz out of the box. Memory clock is unchanged at 2000 MHz.