AMD’s Radeon RX 590 inches closer to launch, will take on Nvidia’s GTX 1060

By Chuong Nguyen Published October 25, 2018

AMD RADEON RX 480 — Bill Roberson/Digital Trends

AMD‘s Radeon RX 590 is now all but officially confirmed. Though AMD has not yet announced the card, the Radeon RX 590 made an appearance at the Eurasian Economic Union certification office after third-party manufacturer PowerColor submitted the graphics card for regulatory approval. The government listing shows two product codes, an AXRX 580 8GBD5-3DH/OC and a second AXRX 690 8GBD5-3DH/OC. The second product code is believed to be for the Radeon RX 590, while the first code may be for an overclocked version of AMD’s current RX 580 with more video memory, according to TechRadar.

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This isn’t the first time that we’re hearing about the Radeon RX 590. Previously, the chip was spotted going through 3DMark’s benchmark tests. The results of those earlier leaked benchmarks put the performance of AMD’s Radeon RX 590 directly in between the performance of Nvidia’s competing GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 cards. This should give most gamers quite a bit of graphics performance, but if the early benchmarks are to be believed, the Radeon RX 590 still won’t be able to top Nvidia’s flagship GTX 1080 card. As such, the Radeon RX 590 is expected to be a competitive mid-range graphics card, and if AMD is able to price the new GPU aggressively, this could be a big win for gamers or those wanting a virtual reality-compatible system.

From the performance benchmarks, it appears that AMD is pushing for faster clock speeds with the RX 590. The graphics card clocked in at 1,545MHz, compared to the RX 580’s 1,340MHz. The new RX 590 is expected to share the same 8GB GDDR5 memory and 2,000Hz memory bus clock speed as the Radeon RX580. Though we don’t know when the RX 590 is expected to be announced, earlier reports suggested that AMD could refresh its Radeon RX 500 lineup in 2019. The new cards could be built on a new 12nm manufacturing process as part of AMD’s Polaris 30 architecture.

To compete against the Radeon RX 590, rival Nvidia may also be working on a more affordable GPU option that delivers more performance to counter AMD in the mid-range space. Earlier this week, we reported that Nvidia may be refreshing its GTX 1060 card with faster GDDR5 video memory to give it a performance boost.

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