PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 590 review: Trying to keep things fresh

AMD has been focusing on CPUs for a while now, and we haven't heard anything from it in the gaming GPU space for well over a year. But in November, the company broke the silence with the announcement of tie Radeon RX 590, its new mainstream champion. 

On paper, the Radeon RX 590 looks pretty boring. It's not Vega or Navi, and it's still based on the same two-year-old Polaris architecture as the Radeon RX 580. However, that doesn't mean that the card is a bad move on the part of AMD. In fact, it's a pretty smart and well-considered play, seeing as mainstream users comprise the largest segment of gamers. 

Now that the US$349 GeForce RTX 2060 has been released, the Radeon RX 590 is up against much stiffer competition, but it remains a viable option for someone on an even tighter budget. AMD has set the retail price at US$279, but it isn't releasing a reference model for the Radeon RX 590, so we'll be basing our impressions on the PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 590. 

AMD's latest Polaris graphics card uses GlobalFoundries' 12nm process node, so that's one thing that's changed coming from the Radeon RX 580 and its 14nm process. Nearly everything else remains unchanged though, including the 2,304 Graphics Core Next (GCN) stream processors, 144 texture units, 32 ROPs, and 8GB of GDDR5 memory. It also has a 256-bit memory bus width, which gives it a total memory bandwidth of 256GB/s. 

The most significant difference is probably the nice increase in clock speeds. PowerColor's Red Devil card can boost up to 1,576MHz, compared to 1,380MHz on the equivalent Radeon RX 580 model. That's a 196MHz increase, which propels the card past the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB. 

PowerColor's card is pretty fat, measuring 57mm thick, which means you'll need a three-slot allowance to install it. In addition, it's powered by one 6-pin and one 8-pin power connector. 

A lot of its girth is due to the larger cooler, which comprises five heat pipes and a thick fin stack to provide more surface area for heat dissipation. The two ball-bearing fans also support semi-passive operation, so they'll stop spinning entirely once temperatures fall below 50°C. 

Round the back, you'll find three DisplayPorts, one HDMI, and one dual-link DVI-D output. Finally, the card has a rated TDP of 225W, which still gives NVIDIA a healthy lead in terms of power efficiency.

Test Setup

The detailed specifications of our new graphics card testbed system is as follows:-

• Intel Core i7-8086K (4.0GHz, 12MB L3 cache)
• ASUS ROG Strix Maximus X Hero (Intel Z370)
• 4 x 8GB G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3000 (Auto timings: CAS 15-15-15-35)
• Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SSD
• Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
• Acer Predator X27, 4K monitor

The full line-up of graphics cards and their driver versions are listed below:

• PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 590 (Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 18.12.3)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (ForceWare 417.35)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (ForceWare 417.35)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 (ForceWare 417.54)

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Benchmarks

Next up, here's a list of all the benchmarks used:

• 3DMark
• VRMark
• Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation
• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
• Far Cry 5
• Middle-earth: Shadow of War
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Tom Clancy's The Division

We used the Fire Strike Extreme benchmark and stress test in 3DMark for our temperature  and power consumption tests respectively.

3DMark

The synthetic 3DMark benchmark tests graphics and computational performance at different resolutions, starting at 1080p and going all the way up to 4K. A series of two graphics test, one physics test, and then a combined test stress your hardware in turn to assess its performance.

The Radeon RX 590 sits pretty snugly between the GeForce GTX 1060 and 1070. It's around 18 per cent quicker than the GeForce GTX 1060, but it's nowhere close to challenging NVIDIA's new mainstream offering, the GeForce RTX 2060. 

VRMark

Futuremark’s VRMark benchmark is designed to assess a PC’s ability to handle high-performance headsets like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. If a PC passes the Orange Room test, it is ready for the latter two systems. The second graph also shows how the cards fared against the benchmark's target of an average FPS of 109. 

One again, the Radeon RX 590 edged ahead of the GeForce GTX 1060 by around 11 per cent. However, it still continued to trail both the GeForce GTX 1070 and RTX 2060. 

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation

Ashes of the Singularity has long been the poster child for the performance benefits a low-level API like DirectX 12 can bring. It is based on the Nitrous engine and can be extremely punishing thanks to the huge number of onscreen units and the sheer level of detail accorded to each unit. However, the CPU does become the limiting factor at lower resolutions and settings. 

Like the GeForce GTX 1060, the Radeon RX 590 doesn't do too well with the settings cranked up. It churns out playable frame rates to be sure, but it falls far short of the 60FPS ideal at Crazy settings, even at 1080p.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Mankind Divided features just about every trick to make your game look pretty, including things like volumetric and dynamic lighting, screenspace reflections, and cloth physics. Even though it was released in 2016, the game is capable of bringing even the most powerful systems to their knees. 

The Radeon RX 590 was around 18 per cent quicker than the GeForce GTX 1060 at 1080p and Ultra settings. While the more expensive GeForce RTX 2060 once again remains unchallenged, the Radeon RX 590 is also cheaper. 

Far Cry 5

The latest installment in the Far Cry series is actually an AMD launch title, so it'll be interesting to see how the Radeon RX 590 fares here.

As it turns out, it doesn't actually have that big of a lead over the GeForce GTX 1060, coming ahead by just 9 per cent. 

Middle-earth: Shadow of War

The same thing plays out in Shadow of War, where the Radeon RX 590 has an 8 per cent edge over the GeForce GTX 1060 at 1080p and Ultra settings.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

The latest installment in the Tomb Raider series hands the Radeon RX 590 an 8 per cent lead over the GeForce GTX 1060, not unlike in Shadow of War. 

Tom Clancy's The Division

Finally, The Division sees the Radeon RX 590 get just under an 11 per cent advantage over the GeForce GTX 1060, again at 1080p and Ultra settings. The GeForce RTX 2060 has a sizeable 28 per cent lead here, so you'll really need to decide if you want to shell out extra for NVIDIA's new mainstream GPU. 

Temperature and power consumption

The peak temperature was taken after running 40 loops of 3DMark's Fire Strike Extreme stress test. Similarly, the power consumption figures were cleaned from a run of 3DMark's Fire Strike Extreme benchmark. 

The chunky custom cooler on the PowerColor card did it good here, and it beat out all of NVIDIA's Founders Edition offerings with the coolest temperatures. It didn't fare so well in terms of power consumption and efficiency though, netting the highest peak and idle power consumption figures, even though it was far from being the quickest card here. 

Making a play in the biggest GPU market

The Radeon RX 590 is a tricky card to parse. AMD clearly put in minimal effort to make it, and it seems more like a bid to get people talking than anything. At US$279, it's attractively priced for sure, so the card is well-positioned to appeal to bargain hunters looking to game at 1080p. 

However, while the card may have seemed like a wily move on the part of AMD when it was first announced in November, it's not as clear where it stands now. Back then, NVIDIA's mainstream offering was still the US$249 GeForce GTX 1060 (or its GDDR5X variants), as it had been for the longest time. AMD then released a faster card, which looked like it might have a good chance at grabbing a slice of the mainstream pie away from the GeForce GTX 1060. 

But with the release of the US$349 GeForce RTX 2060, it's not immediately clear why anyone would pick the Radeon RX 590 over it. The GeForce RTX 2060 is significantly faster, consumes less power, and isn't actually that much more expensive. The US$70 price premium it asks for doesn't seem too steep for a card that features the latest ray-tracing tech and can run nearly any game at 1080p and max settings. 

The Radeon RX 590 isn't a bad card. However, if we're talking strictly about gaming, there are just better alternatives out there. And honestly, a card that's based on an aging two-year-old architecture doesn't do a lot to get you excited about it. At the moment, I'm just looking forward to see what Navi will bring to the table. Meanwhile, there's also the just-announced Radeon VII that's coming in a month's time.

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