The AMD Radeon RX 500 series is the new midrange GPU lineup by the company. It is not really an upgrade to the RX 400 series as it does not come up with new architecture. This series features the same Polaris technology but it has been tweaked and refined over the past years to achieve higher clock speed and better performance.
Today we are going to take a look at the AMD’s Radeon RX 570. It is not really a game changer, it is basically a refreshed overclocked AMD RX 470 with a slightly tweaked GPU architecture. I loved the 470 but it didn’t really get a huge amount of traction it was overlooked for the most part, my aim here is to shine a spotlight on the RX 570 to show you what it can do. In this article we are going to talk about its architecture, specifications and performance. So without further ado let’s get started.
Design:
First up let’s take a look at the card that AMD sent me for review, it’s the Asus Strix model meaning beautifully quiet operation with very nice build quality and gigantic dual fan design cooling system. The power is delivered with a single 8 pin input located on the side of the graphics card. Flip the card over and the whole board is exposed as there is no back plate. Also there are two DisplayPort 1.4 connectors, two HDMI 2.0s and a DVI connector as well. Overall it is a really well designed graphics card at this price point.
AMD Radeon RX 570 Architecture:
The graphics card features what AMD calls “Polaris Enhanced” architecture which is basically refinements to the 14nm FinFET process designed to provide with clock speed bumps on the 500-series GPUs. The core configuration you get is featuring 2,048 stream processors spread out alongside the 32 compute units (CUs) with the same 128 texture units and 32 ROPs (render output units).
The only new feature added to the Polaris GPU is the intermediate memory clock speed, the previous generation only supported two states, ‘low/idle’ and ‘max performance.’ This intermediate state can help in reducing the power consumption.
Also, the company has improved their power saving feature known as the Radeon Chill which basically caps framerates in order to improve the overall power usage which in some cases can result in stuttering. This can serve as a great feature for notebooks but unfortunately, it does not work with the DX12 or Vulkan because it is a driver-side tuning feature and the low-level APIs bypass such things.
Specifications:
The tweaked GPU architecture helps in getting increased clock speeds, the base clock of the RX 570 is 1168 MHz and the boost clock is 1244 MHz. The increase in clock speed at the high end is not a huge improvement but at the baseline, things have definitely gone up. AMD is aiming at mid-range PC builders that are using two or more years old GPU. What this means is that if you own a RX-400 series card then you definitely don’t need to upgrade to RX 570.
You can choose between 4 and 8 Gigabytes of GDDR5 memory model. I’d recommend you to go with the 8 Gigs variant if you want some decent performance in modern games. Also, the memory of this card is clocked at 7 GHz.
Performance And Benchmarks:
The performance is pretty much what you expect from a graphics card at this price point. It is capable of playing all the recent AAA titles at maxed out setting and 1080p resolution. The 60 FPS mark is easily achievable although in some really visual demanding games you might need to turn down some graphics options. We tested out Forza Horizon 3, Overwatch, Rise of Tomb Raider and Watchdogs 2. The gaming experience was pretty smooth and there were almost no stuttering.
The benchmark performance was also solid
We did our usual benchmark test that is we tested this GPU on max settings on 3D Mark 11 and Ungine Valley and this GPU easily defeated the Geforce GTX 1060 3GB, even though real world results show a much closer race.
Final Verdict:
Overall the AMD Radeon RX 570 is one of the best mid-range option that you can get your hands on. Although it might be difficult to find this card as it is mostly out of stock because of the cryptocurrency mining crisis and even if you do find one it will cost so much more than its original selling price. But if you do manage to find at a good price then definitely pick it up one or maybe even 10 to earn some profit.
