AMD Radeon RX 580 And RX 570 Mainstream GPU Review: High Performance Polaris

Performance Summary: The MSI Radeon RX 580 and RX 570 Gaming X cards we tested performed well in our tests. The MSI Radeon RX 580 Gaming X clearly outpaced the Radeon RX 480, and was faster than the GeForce GTX 1060 Founder’s Edition more often than not. It was more evenly matched with the factory-overclocked EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 SSC, however. The two cards traded victories in a handful of benchmarks.

The MSI Radeon RX 570 Gaming X consistently outran the Radeon RX 470 and GeForce GTX 1050 Ti cards, however. And typically finished only a couple of percentage points behind the Radeon RX 480. Both the MSI Radeon RX 580 and RX 570 Gaming X, however, consumed more power than the other cards – NVIDIA’s Pascal-based offerings in particular were the most power-friendly of the bunch. The Radeon RX 500 series cards we tested compete well with NVIDIA's equivalents in delivered performance, but clearly not in terms of performance per watt.

Although we featured only the Radeon RX 580 and RX 570 here, AMD is actually launching an entire line-up of cards today. The Radeon RX 500 series will initially consist of the following four products...


At the entry level is the small form factor Radeon RX 550, which is a low-power offering with 8 CUs, 2GB of memory, and an 1183MHz boost clock, being positioned as an ideal HTPC GPU or an upgrade over integrated graphics solutions. Next up the stack of the Radeon RX 560, which will pack 16 CUs and 4GB of memory, with a boost clock of 1275MHz. The RX 560 targets 1080P gamers and has roughly half the resources of the RX 580. And then there are the Radeon RX 580 and RX 570 cards we showed you here.

All told, the new AMD Radeon RX 500 series cards are all upgrades over their 400-series predecessors, though fundamentally they are very similar. If you have a Radeon RX 480 or RX 470 (or equivalent competitor) the Radeon RX 500 series may not compel you to upgrade. But versus older cards that lack support for things like FreeSync, Radeon Chill, ReLive, and HEVC and H.265 4K Encode/Decoding, the proposition may be much more enticing.

Because the vast majority of Radeon RX 500 series cards will be custom, and many will feature factory overclocks, pricing is somewhat varied. The MSI RX 580 and RX 570 cards we showed you here will be priced at about $245 and $175, respectively. Some limited edition RX 580 cards will be priced in the $275 range, however, while less elaborate RX 580s will hit the $220 mark, 4GB RX 580s around $200, and RX 570s will be available for as low as $169. That puts these cards in the same categories as the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and GeForce GTX 1060, hence the comparisons on the preceding pages.

Ultimately, the AMD Radeon RX 500 series cards are iterative updates that offer more performance at every market segment. They don’t offer huge, generational leaps in performance versus the RX 400 series, but are measurable upgrades nonetheless, that offer more features and support for the latest technologies, that older cards lack.

And now, we patiently wait for Vega...

Upgraded Performance Support For Latest Features Competitive Pricing	Higher Power Consumption Same Architecture As Previous-Gen