HiGame

AMD launched an entire refresh cycle of its midrange graphics cards today. While our review focuses on the RX 580, AMD is also shipping new SKUs for the RX 460 and 470, as well as a new part, the RX 550. Let’s step through what’s changed for these chips, and what the updates mean for gamers in these market segments.

RX 560 and RX 570

The RX 560 and RX 570 are both iterative improvements of the RX 460 and RX 470 GPUs AMD launched nearly a year ago. Both Anandtech and Hot Hardware included the RX 570 in their reviews, and it broadly shows the same pattern as the RX 580 — which is to say, performance is improved by ~12*percent, the GPUs are quieter (thanks to improved cooling solutions relative to AMD’s reference designs on the RX 470 / RX 480), and they throttle much less. The flip side is that these GPUs do burn more power. Anandtech’s review implies that the RX 570’s power curve is a bit better than the RX 580s, meaning the gap between the stock RX 470 and a custom, overclocked RX 570 is about 10 percent smaller than the equivalent gap between a stock RX 480 and an overclocked RX 580. Since the RX 570 is also clocked lower than the RX 580, this fits our theory that Polaris is slamming into the top of its frequency curve. We don’t know how much headroom is left in these chips, but we’re fairly certain tapping it will burn larger and larger amounts of power relative to measured performance improvement.

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