PowerColor Red Devil RX 590 Review

PowerColor Red Devil RX 590 Review

Introduction

Such has been the efforts AMD have put into their Ryzen CPUs – with extraordinary results – the GPU side of their business has been slightly left behind. Development costs are always insane and it would be asking too much of a company to completely revise both elements of their companies portfolio at the same time.

However, the RX 580 was a very attractive mid-range card and a little bit of an upgrade is always welcome. The RX 590, here in PowerColor Red Devil guise, is based upon the same 4th Generation of the GCN Architecture, but with some of the always popular power creep in the form of faster clock speeds and a reduced manufacturing process allowing you to pump yet more Watts to the GPU.

Despite the high end of gaming being all about producing 4K splendour, the reality is that most people still game at the hugely popular 1080P resolution, the target audience for the RX 590. Does it improve upon the RX 580 enough to tempt your wallet?

Technical Specifications

As you can see, the RX 590 is largely a faster version of the RX 580, with the reduction in process from the 14nm of the old RX 580 to the smaller 12nm of the RX 590 enabling higher clock speeds and more power to be fed to the card, hopefully giving it a boost in performance when compared to the current Radeon 5 series range.

  Radeon RX 590 Radeon RX 580
GCN Architecture 4th Generation 4th Generation
Manufacturing Process 12nm FinFET 14nm FinFET
Die Size 232 mm2 232 mm2
Compute Units 36 36
Stream Processors 2304 2304
Clock Speed (Boost/Base) 1545 MHz/1469 MHz 1340 MHz/1257 MHz
Compute Performance 7.1 TFLOPS 6.17 TFLOPS
Texture Units 144 144
Texture Fill Rate 222.4 GT/s 190 GT/s
ROPs 32 32
Pixel Fill Rate 49.5 GP/s 42.9 GP/s
Memory Size 8 GB 8 GB
Memory Bandwidth 256 GB/s 256 GB/s
Memory Interface 256 bit 256 bit
Memory Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Board Power 225W 185W
Freesync Support Yes Yes
DirectX 12 Support Yes Yes
Vulkan Support Yes Yes
Display Port Version 1.3 HBR/1.4 HDR 1.3 HBR/1.4 HDR