The AMD Radeon RX 580 & RX 570 Review: A Second Path to Polaris
by Ryan Smith on April 18, 2017 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Polaris
- Radeon RX 500
The Test
Before diving into our tests, I want to quickly touch upon the test setup. Since AMD isn’t making any reference RX 580 or RX 570 cards, they instead sent over the PoworColor and Sapphire cards listed on the previous page. However both of those are factory overclocked, so both needed to be underclocked to stand-in for the baseline RX 580 and RX 570 cards.
The trick with underclocking cards like this isn’t the clockspeeds, but rather the power consumption. Factory overclocked cards are frequently built and configured for higher TDPs to support their frequencies, which can throw off our results, especially if a baseline card would power throttle in the same situation. So it’s sometimes not enough to simply underclock a card to represent the baseline performance.
In the case of today’s cards, thankfully both of them ship with a second, lower power BIOS. PowerColor calls this Quiet OC on the Red Devil RX 580, and along with reducing the max GPU power by 20W, it reduces the GPU boost clock to 1355MHz, a 15MHz overclock. Sapphire does one better on their Nitro+, as the second BIOS reduces the GPU power by 25W and brings the card down to AMD’s reference clocks.
PowerColor RedDevil RX 580's "Quiet OC" BIOS
Unfortunately the power limit coded into the BIOS don’t perfectly correlate with TBP – the value is just for GPU power – so it’s difficult to precisely tell if these BIOSes match AMD’s 185W and 150W TBPs. However if these values are off, they should still be close to what a real baseline card would get, as they’re in the ballpark of what I’d expect for AMD’s TBPs to begin with. So our results here should be reasonably accurate here for both total power consumption and for accounting for any power throttling during testing.
For our review of the Radeon RX 580 & RX 570, we’re using AMD’s “Crimson Press” driver, version 17.10.1030. Going by the build number, this driver appears to be between the latest 17.3.1 and 17.4.1 Crimson public drivers.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 580 Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 570 AMD Radeon RX 480 (8GB) AMD Radeon RX 470 AMD Radeon R9 380 AMD Radeon R7 370 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Founder's Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Founder's Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 381.65 AMD Radeon Software Crimson Press Beta 17.10.1030 |
| OS: | Windows 10 Pro |
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ToTTenTranz - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
"If you're looking at these cards, you're likely not going to be buying the newer games. You'll likely be buying humble bundle or bundle star class games for your kids or feed your gaming addiction."I don't even..
paulemannsen - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
You might be on to something there. 1050ti owners probably only play doom 1 or games from CDs found in the trash bin.Icehawk - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Tell that to my friends who buy x60 series of NV cards and tons of new, AAA, titles. They don't have QHD/UHD monitors and for most games the x60s are "enough".Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
Exactly. Lots of people play new games at 1080p and want high quality graphics at 60 fps.Ryan makes the point that in the last year or two not many games have pushed graphics further, especially in FPSs.
Yojimbo - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
I don't think it makes sense to claim Doom is a representation of Vulkan. Add Doom to add Doom, OK, but not because it's a Vulkan game. BTW, that site has the stock clocked Radeon RX 570 outperforming the GTX 1060 FE 6GB in Witcher 3 at 1080p, which seems rather odd. I can't read German, but I don't see where they tell what settings they used to achieve that.milli - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
I can't tell you what settings they've used for that game. But one thing that most people don't take into account is that measured performance on a certain map of a game, doesn't automatically translate into universal/general performance of a card in that game. Often a game will require different performance characteristics just by using a different map. Computerbase seems to be using a heavier map or settings since average frame rates seem to be lower.One other difference is that Anand is testing with a Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz and Computerbase is testing with Intel Core i7-6850K @ 4.3GHz. I'm pretty sure the AMD cards benefit more from the higher single thread performance of the 6850K.
Yojimbo - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Perhaps, but I've seen Witcher 3 benchmarks comparing the 1060 with the 480 and 470 from maybe half a dozen sites and have never seen anything like that before. It's an outlier.HomeworldFound - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
I brought that up with the 1080ti review. I was told that they'll modernise their testing suite at some point.Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
For Vega, I think Ryan said.Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
<reads two comments down> oh.