Launching today from $280 (UK pricing is yet to be confirmed at time of writing), there will be four partner cards to choose from when buying an RX 590: one from Asus, Sapphire, PowerColor and XFX, the latter of which I've been sent for testing (and yes, that is a genuine and earnest use of 'FATBOY' on the box). Sure, the GTX 1070 and Vega 56 will do 60fps at 2560x1440 mostly at max quality or very well near it, while the GTX 1060 and RX 580 tend to max out around medium settings, but is that really worth another £150 / $200? After all, neither the GTX 1070 or Vega 56 are really quite good enough for gaming at 4K to any great degree, so the main benefits you're getting are mainly going to be felt at 1440p.Įnter the RX 590, the card that AMD are hoping will fill that gap and then some. That's a big jump for what some might consider only a marginal boost in performance.

There are, of course, always going to be some cards lying on either side of those price brackets, but that's the rough average when you look at everything all together. You've got your Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060s and your AMD Radeon RX 580s down at one end in the region of £250 / $250 (which are still my two best graphics card recommendations for 1080p and 1440p gaming, by the way), and then there's nothing until you get to Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1070 and AMD's Radeon RX Vega 56 cards around the £400 / $450 mark. Let's take a look, shall we?Īccording to AMD, you see, there's a giant hole in mid-range graphics card land right now. Alas, it's still not one of the long-awaited Big Navi GPUs everyone's been whispering about - it's fundamentally a Polaris card just like the rest of AMD's RX 500 family - but it is the first one to use a 12 nanometer (nm) manufacturing process, which AMD say gives it a 12% performance boost over the still very much alive Radeon RX 580.

Well, this is a surprise, isn't it? After all the hoo-hah surrounding the new RTX graphics cards, AMD have gone and snuck in another mid-ranger right under our noses in the form of the Radeon RX 590.

Amd radeon rx 590