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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sandman74 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
I agree with Ryan on the benchmarks. I often look back at older reviews to find a card that compares with my current one and seeing a game like BF4 in there helps me compare easily across both spectrums of my old card (a 980) and the newer cards.If they just showed newer games I wouldn't have a reference point for my older card.
Plus I still play BF4 !
Thanks for a detailed review.
cjpp78 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
They should have gave us the GPU in the Xbox Scorpio as the rx580..Of course with higher clocksSajidrh - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
I have a 450 watts 80+ PSU form Antec Is it enough for RX 580 8gb???Sajidrh - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
its 80+ BronzeKakti - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
You'd have to tell us a lot more about your system. The main power hogs besides a dGPU are going to be the CPU (and if it's OC'd) and how many disk drives/dvd readers/etc you have. Assuming a stock i5 and two SATA drives max, I think 450 would be ok. A 90+watt CPU and a half dozen hard drives would probably be cutting it close at peak usage with a 580Haawser - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ9ro5pwfXYPeople so need to watch this before buying a 1060. The RX 580 + Freesync = Holy crap !
Hrel - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
Wow, Nvidia is just demolishing them. That card will need to be at least $50 cheaper than the GTX1060 just to make any sense at all, and that's for the 580. Which is a problem since it's priced directly against the 1060.CiccioB - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
"we'll give you better cards, our efficiency has improved 2.5x over GCN, we will lead the revolution to new performance for games, we will end the increasing cost run, we will bla bla bla""Ermmm, in reality we cannot do anything of the above. As we already delivered a sub standard GPU than expected, we just decided to make more fools of ourselves and take that underwhelming power hungry sh*t called Polaris 10 that we can't sell even when given away for free and we are going to make you believe we have done a new revision with better characteristics by overclocking it a little making its inefficiency even better.
We could do exactly the same in July 2016, but we like when we ordinarily fool you and you happily cry for happiness in seeing those colored bars going a bit longer. Never mind the 240W needed to make the same work as a 1060... Remember... Look at my hypnotic eyes... We are going to deliver a more efficient product 2.5x better than GCN that will close the gap with the concurrent's now legendary performance/watt ratio."
If GCN was highly inefficient with respect to Maxwell, this sh*t is not even comparable to Pascal. AMD could not do worse than this.
The suspect is that this way Vega will look better than expected with respect to this... well... sh*t. There's no other way to call this faked improvements.
Pork@III - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link
Yes but with a little fix: "2.5x >oven< GCN" :DI think I'll take this card to bake steaks on her. I will just remove the fans.
Outlander_04 - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link
AMD improves its lead in DX 12 .No surprises