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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AMD#1 - Tuesday, November 20, 2018 - link
Well, they released a card this year for the consumer market. My hopes are that Navi will be a better option against NVIDIA RTX, good that Radeon will not support RT. Let NVIDIA first support DX12 with hardware shader units, instead of hanging on to DYING DX11.silverblue - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
A couple of reviews seem to be showing the Fatboy at similar power consumption (or slightly higher) levels to the 580 Nitro+ (presumably the 1450MHz version) and Red Devil Golden Sample. That's not so bad when you factor in the significantly increased clocks, but the two 580s hardly sipped power to begin with, and basic 580s don't really perform much worse for what would be much lower power consumption. AMD has a product that kind of bridges the gap between the 1060 and the 1070, but uses more power than a 1080... hardly envious, really. The Fatboy has rather poor thermals as well if you don't ramp the fan speed up.The 590s we're getting are clocked aggressively on core but not on memory; what would really be interesting is a 590 clocked at 580 levels, even factory overclocked 580 levels. Would it be worth getting a 590 just to undervolt and underclock the core, make use of the extra game in the bundle (once they launch, that is), and essentially be running a more efficient 580? I'd be tempted to overclock the memory at the same time as that appears to be where the 580 is being held back, not core speed.
silverblue - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
I'll be fair to the Fatboy; it does have a zero RPM mode which would explain the thermals.WaltC - Sunday, December 2, 2018 - link
I just bought a Fatboy...to run in X-fire with my year-old 8GB RX-480 (1.305GHz stock)...! As I am now gaming at 3840x2160, it seemed a worthwhile alternative to dropping $500+ on a single GPU. Paid $297 @ NewEgg & got the 3-game bundle. I read one review by a guy who X-fired a 580 with a 480 without difficulty--and the performance scaled from 70%-90% better when X-Fire is supported. Wouldn't recommend buying two 590's at one time, of course, but for people who already own a 480/580, the X-Fire alternative is the most cost-effective route at present. Gaming sites seem to have forgotten about X-Fire these days, for some reason. Of course, the nVidia 1060 doesn't allow for SLI--so that might be one reason, I suppose. Still, it's kind of baffling as the X-Fire mode seems like such a no brainer. And for those titles that will not X-fire, I'll just run them all @ 1.6GHz on the 590...Until next year when AMD's next < $300 GPU launches...! Then, I may have to think again!quadibloc - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Oh, so Global Foundries does now have a 12 nm process? I'm glad they're doing something a little better than 14 nm at least.