The AMD Radeon RX 590 Review, feat. XFX & PowerColor: Polaris Returns (Again)
by Nate Oh on November 15, 2018 9:00 AM ESTGrand Theft Auto V (DX11)
Now a truly venerable title, GTA V is a veteran of past game suites that is still graphically demanding as they come. As an older DX11 title, it provides a glimpse into the graphically intensive games of yesteryear that don't incorporate the latest features. Originally released for consoles in 2013, the PC port came with a slew of graphical enhancements and options. Just as importantly, GTA V includes a rather intensive and informative built-in benchmark, somewhat uncommon in open-world games.
The settings are identical to its previous appearances, which are custom as GTA V does not have presets. To recap, a "Very High" quality is used, where all primary graphics settings turned up to their highest setting, except 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 rendering features - the game's long shadows, high resolution shadows, and high definition flight streaming - but not increasing the view distance any further.
The ever-popular GTA V has proven itself a very demanding game even on the latest hardware, despite its age. Overall NVIDIA cards usually fare much better on it, and the GTX 1060 6GB is no exception. Polaris' best efforts across generations have narrowed the gap but isn't enough to bring it into contention against the GTX 1060 6GB. The 2GB framebuffer of the GTX 960 isn't sufficient for 1440p and falls behind the R9 380 4GB with completely unplayable performance, though at 1440p both the R9 380 4GB and the GTX 960 lack the raw horsepower to drive gameplay at that resolution anyway.
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neblogai - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
For me, and many other people 2080 or 2080Ti might as well not exist. I'd never buy any GPU priced like that. In fact, I'd never even buy a €300+ card. Also- power use is not an issue- at 200W+, it is easy to cool, not noisy, and savings in electricity cost from having a GTX1060 would be only €5-10 per year (at 20 hour gaming per week, which I do not achieve). And in a sub-€300 market- nVidia has not offered anything for 2.5 years. So it is certainly better deal to buy a faster RX590 and get a €180 AAA game bundle for free, compared to similarly priced, slower GTX1060. There are other reasons as well, like Freesync, and futureproofing like 8GB of VRAM and better driver support (because nVidia will be moving toward doing optimizations for 20xx series).eva02langley - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
It is a polaris card. Everybody knew what to expect. I am not sure what you are talking about.Navi is due next year and the contender will be the 2070 RTX. I am going to speculate a tag price of 300$ which is a whole 200-300$ less than a RTX.
mapesdhs - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Xex360, AMD is not trying to compete because just don't buy them, so what's the point? There market and brand awareness simply isn't there to support a high end product stack atm, not until gamers stop being so irrational and actually buy AMD when they are objectively the more sensible option, whether based on price, performance or some combination of metrics.Cooe - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
"but now built on GlobalFoundries' 12nm process"Sorry, Nate, but ya got that one wrong. Polaris 30 is being fabbed at TSMC, just like the rest of AMD's GPUs.
eva02langley - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
... sure....porcupineLTD - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Where are people getting this from?Ryan Smith - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Note that we currently have no information cooroborating the use of TSMC. And indeed it seems incredibly unlikely given AMD's WSA, and the fact that Polaris 30 has the exact same die size as Polaris 10. TSMC and GF's 12nm processes are not identical, porting a chip to TSMC would given you different geometry dimensions.lmcd - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Just like the rest of AMD's...https://www.anandtech.com/show/10446/the-amd-radeo...
GPUs. Right.
maroon1 - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
What a jokeOnly 12% faster but also cost and consume more power than RX580 (and 108watt more than GTX 1060 at load)
It adds noting new. It just fills the big gap between RX580 and vega56
dr.denton - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
"It adds noting new. It just fills the big gap between RX580 and vega56"Literally all it was ever intended to do. Polaris is a 2 year old mid range GPU design, how do you expect anything revolutionary from that?