The AMD Radeon RX 580 & RX 570 Review: A Second Path to Polaris
by Ryan Smith on April 18, 2017 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Polaris
- Radeon RX 500
Grand Theft Auto V
The latest edition of Rockstar’s venerable series of open world action games, Grand Theft Auto V was originally released to the last-gen consoles back in 2013. However thanks to a rather significant facelift for the current-gen consoles and PCs, along with the ability to greatly turn up rendering distances and add other features like MSAA and more realistic shadows, the end result is a game that is still among the most stressful of our benchmarks when all of its features are turned up. Furthermore, in a move rather uncharacteristic of most open world action games, Grand Theft Auto also includes a very comprehensive benchmark mode, giving us a great chance to look into the performance of an open world action game.
On a quick note about settings, as Grand Theft Auto V doesn't have pre-defined settings tiers, I want to quickly note what settings we're using. For "Very High" quality we have all of the primary graphics settings turned up to their highest setting, with the exception of grass, which is at its own very high setting. Meanwhile 4x MSAA is enabled for direct views and reflections. This setting also involves turning on some of the advanced redering features - the game's long shadows, high resolution shadows, and high definition flight streaming - but it not increasing the view distance any further.
Otherwise for "High" quality we take the same basic settings but turn off all MSAA, which significantly reduces the GPU rendering and VRAM requirements.
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JasonMZW20 - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link
Tile-based rendering does wonders for power consumption. AMD is still doing full scene rendering, which is expensive and inefficient.Vega will join the TBR party. We'll see if power consumption has dropped significantly then.
But, isn't that the general rule when you OC? Throw power saving out the window. I have my old R9 280 at 1200MHz. Draws about 230W. Don't really care.
Tewt - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
I was hoping to read something about Freesync 2 and moreso now after reading the review to find the performance gains weren't as exciting and not without caveats. Since there currently are no Freesync 2 monitors though, there is no point in reviewing this feature. It would have been a nice value added feature to help offset the minimal gains in performance. Too bad AMD couldn't capitalize on this feature to make this release more exciting.Cygni - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Keeping the memory specs down will help them move to undercutting the 1060 on price, which they will need to do pretty heartily to get some sales volume. Hopefully this is enough to encourage Nvidia into a price war, as they have been milking the 1060's pricepoint pretty heavily for a long time now. Other than a brief dip to the $210 range on black friday, prices have stayed pretty high on 6GB cards.brucek2 - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Most of us learn as small children the peril of crying wolf. You'll get a lot of attention the first time you do it, but if there's no actual wolf you'll soon get a bad reputation and no further attention.AMD is crying wolf here. These are not new generation products. The new numbering is essentially a lie. I still very much want there to be a real competitor to Nvidia / Intel, but crud like this is not making it easy to root for them.
fanofanand - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
New to the tech world? This is pretty standard stuff after a new arch. Nvidia has done it several times as have AMD. Guess what, Intel and AMD do it with their CPUs too. Oh my, looks like it happens with mobile SOCs too.haukionkannel - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
It is norm to have rebrands by both makers. Same is true to cpus even more...tipoo - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link
They were pretty clear early on that it was just an overclock of the 480, and that's what it is. Not sure what people expected. Would 485 be a better name? Probably, but that's the GPU world for ya.AbbieHoffman - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
And yet the old R9 290X and R9 390X are still better cards.sonichedgehog36 - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Typo: TBPs on page one.sonichedgehog36 - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Please delete the post above.