Which graphics card should I buy?

Relative to the RX 480 and RX 470 then, the performance gains we’re seeing with the RX 580 and RX 570 are nothing spectacular, but then AMD has kept their promises similarly small. In practice this means that the RX 580 is only averaging 3% faster than the RX 480 it replaces in AMD’s product stack, while the RX 570 looks better, picking up 7% over the RX 470. Based on these numbers, I feel it’s fair to say that while both cards are faster than their earlier incarnations, I wouldn’t fault anyone for lumping the two generations of cards together. The small gains don’t enable the newer RX 500 cards to do anything the RX 400 cards couldn’t always do; though even a few percent can make all the difference in a game right on the bubble of sustaining 60fps.

The big change here is on power consumption. RX 580 is a 185W card, while RX 570 starts at 150W. This is a 30-35W increase in TBPs over the RX 400 series, and given the expected prevalence of factory overclocked cards, the TBP of the average retail SKU is probably a bit higher still. Manufacturing improvements in the last year have allowed Polaris to clock higher and/or reduce power consumption slightly at a given clockspeed, however in AMD’s case they’ve opted to spend all of these gains (and then-some) on clockspeed improvements, hence the TBPs we’re seeing today.

While this is a natural consequence of cranking up Polaris’s clockspeeds, what’s not really being said by AMD is why. And while not putting word’s in AMD’s mouth, from an outside perspective it’s pretty easy to see what’s going on. Polaris greatly improved AMD’s energy efficiency, but then Pascal did much the same for NVIDIA. As a result while the RX 400 series cards delivered good performance, they weren’t very competitive with NVIDIA’s GTX 10 series in the realm of power consumption. Consequently AMD’s no longer trying to compete on power efficiency on the Polaris 10 series.

As for the competitive landscape then, AMD’s situation has improved, though I fear by not enough. Across the full spread of games in our benchmark suite, the RX 580 and GTX 1060 6GB change lead a few different times, so the RX 580 is able to best NVIDIA’s best in absolute performance in the right games. The problem for AMD is that those games appear to be too few; as a result the RX 580 trails the GTX 1060 by an average of 7% at both 1080p and 1440p. AMD has narrowed the gap somewhat – this was an 11% deficit with the RX 480 – but not by enough. And coupled with AMD’s worse power efficiency, this puts AMD in a tough spot. The biggest challenge right now is that GTX 1060 prices have come down to the same $229 spot just in time for the RX 500 series launch, so AMD doesn’t have a consistent price advantage. That’s the one thing AMD can change, and it’s likely to be where they need to look next.

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