AMD Radeon RX 590 Polaris Refresh Allegedly Launches November 15, Benchmarks Leak
A juicy new rumor points to AMD launching its upcoming Radeon RX 590 graphics card in time for the holiday shopping season, and specifically on November 15, which is two and a half weeks from today. Previous leaks and rumors suggest it will arrive with a 12-nanometer Polaris 30 GPU underneath the hood and offer strong mid-range performance.
While nothing is official, we're fairly convinced the new Polaris model exists. There is enough evidence to sway us in that direction, including a leaked press render from PowerColor for an upcoming Red Devil variant. ASUS is also rumored to be prepping a Radeon RX 590 graphics card under its Republic of Gamers (ROG) and Strix branding (ROG-STRIX-RX590-8G-GAMING).
We're less confident in the launch date. Several sites are reporting a November 15 launch, with Chinese-language site MyDrivers seemingly the first to report it, based on a forum post that we don't have access to. A November 15 launch is at least plausible though—typically when press renders start to leak, an official release is not far behind.
The site also claims the price will be 2,099 Chinese Yuan, which converts to around $300 in US currency. Pricing typically varies by region, so we don't expect AMD and its hardware partners to stick to a strict currency conversion. Nevertheless, we now have a ballpark figure to work with (albeit one that is not confirmed).
Depending on the performance bump the Radeon RX 590 delivers, $300 might be a tough sell. A quick peek at Newegg shows this MSI Radeon RX 580 graphics card selling for $194.99 after $15 mail-in-rebate, and with a three-game bundle. There are several other models in the $200 to $240 range, such as this PowerColor Red Dragon Radeon RX 580 for $199 after $20 mail-in-rebate, also with a three-game bundle.
The rumored pricing is a bit more competitive with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060 6GB. Those cards are trending on Newegg for around $260 and up, though there are a couple that are a little cheaper—this Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1060 for $239.99 and this Zotac GeForce GTX 1060 Mini for $249.99, with with Monster Hunter: World included.
It's far too early to make any kind of bang-for-buck determination. That said, a purported Radeon RX 590 has shown up in the Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition benchmark database. Here's how it scored in relation to a few other cards at 2560x1440 with the settings on Lite...
- Radeon RX 590: 6,398
- GeForce GTX 1060 6GB: 5,993
- Radeon RX 580: 5,793
- Radeon RX 480: 5,681
And here's where it ranks among the same cards when cranking the visual quality settings to High...
- GeForce GTX 1060: 3,595
- Radeon RX 590: 3,570
- Radeon RX 580: 3,159
- Radeon RX 480: 3,091
The other thing that makes this upcoming launch interesting is that NVIDIA just recently updated its GeForce GTX 1060 6GB model with a version that uses GDDR5X memory instead of GDDR5. Gigabyte and Palit both have updated models ready to go, with Palit listing the memory speed (presumably overclocked) at 8.8Gbps, yields a memory bandwidth of 211.2GB/s. That's up from 192GB/s on GeForce GTX 1060 models that use GDDR5 memory chips.
Buckle up folks, thing are about to speed up in the mid-range category.
