The AMD Radeon RX 590 Review, feat. XFX & PowerColor: Polaris Returns (Again)
by Nate Oh on November 15, 2018 9:00 AM ESTMiddle-earth: Shadow of War (DX11)
Next up is Middle-earth: Shadow of War, the sequel to Shadow of Mordor. Developed by Monolith, whose last hit was arguably F.E.A.R., Shadow of Mordor returned them to the spotlight with an innovative NPC rival generation and interaction system called the Nemesis System, along with a storyline based on J.R.R. Tolkien's legendarium, and making it work on a highly modified engine that originally powered F.E.A.R. in 2005.
Using the new LithTech Firebird engine, Shadow of War improves on the detail and complexity, and with free add-on high resolution texture packs, offers itself as a good example of getting the most graphics out of an engine that may not be bleeding edge. Shadow of War also supports HDR (HDR10).
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, to which Shadow of War is the sequel, was notorious for its VRAM-hungry nature. For Shadow of War, we have Ultra textures enabled, which balloons the in-game required VRAM meter to more than 8GB even at 1080p. But as it is largely for texture caching, only a fraction of that 8GB is necessary to keep things going smoothly, so here, the raw GPU performance remains most important. The solidly mainstream GTX 960 and R9 380 are not fast enough in the first place.
In any case, the RX 580 already edges out the GTX 1060 6GB Founders Edition so the RX 590 only adds to that advantage. But the GTX 1070 being so far ahead, the RX 590 is not even close to approaching those framerates.
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Opencg - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Its just a gap filler. It will help them make money from people wanting to get good performance at that price but... we're still waiting for the serious contenders. Vega refresh will be a little more toward the high end but... navi is where amd could potentially shift the market. RTX means you pay more for less performance outside rtx games. Navi is the opposite you pay less and get more. We need navi to function well and I believe amd can do it.neblogai - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Is is not a gap filler. It is only there, because overproduction of P20 needs to be sold out first. Naturally- P30 should be a replacement of P20, at same price, with minimal investment by MAD or partners.eva02langley - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Polaris is selling well, Vega, not so much beside mining. In Canada, the price are still having a huge price tag because the supply is just so low.Allan_Hundeboll - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
I am surprised a boost frequency increase of 15% nets 12% overall performance. Maybe Polaris isn't as starved for memory bandwidth, as people seem to think. Or AMD made other improvements besides the increased frequency...?mapesdhs - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Frequency increases rarely produce linear performance gains, not when there are so many other aspects of a system that impact what's happening (main CPU, API, game engine, etc.)Allan_Hundeboll - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Yes that is why I'm surprised 15% increase on the core frequency -without any increase of the Vram frequency, would result in 12% overall performance increase. Especially considering the "original Polaris" rx480 was configured with 1266Mhz core boost frequency and 2000Mhz Vram.If AMD figured 1266/2000MHz was near the sweet spot balance between core/mem speed then 1545/2000 would be severly starved for memory bandwidth.
So I'm wondering if 2000MHz memory speed was kind of wasted on the rx480? Or did AMD tighten the Vram timings on this new 590? Or maybe the near linear increase in performance is due to the higher tdp allowing the rx590 to sustain the boost clock while the 480 would throttle to base core frequency of 1120MHz?
SlowSpyder - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Where is 7nm Vega??mapesdhs - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Never going to happen, because gamers won't buy it.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guK2XoFbPFw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USMlET3L7mA
Cyborg997 - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Summer 2019 or late 2019. Definitely soon rtx fighter.schujj07 - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
The most surprising thing to me is just how good RX480 is when you look at the benchmarks. When it launched it was as fast as the GTX970, now it is faster than then GTX980 just due to drivers and newer games being able to use its resources better.