Benchmark Results Tip for AMD RX 590, Show It Beating GTX 1060

There have been rumors that AMD might launch a refreshed Polaris GPU in the fall for a few months now, and it looks like those rumors may be accurate. Benchmark data from the Final Fantasy XV scoreboard shows the RX 590 Series listed, just ahead of the GTX 1060 and a whisker below the GTX 1080. The results below are from the 2560x1440 resolution, at Lite quality.

It's actually interesting to see daylight between the GTX 1060 and GTX 980 as well since in our previous tests the two cards have proven to be nearly identical. Granted, the gap here is still small, at only 1.08x. The FFV data set doesn't have the RX 590 in every resolution or detail level -- 1080p isn't included at all, and 4K is a bad test point for midrange cards, but by 2560x1440 at High quality, the 1060 has retaken a very narrow lead. This appears to be a bit of an oddity to this result, however, as THG makes clear(Opens in a new window) -- overall, the RX 590 has a lead in this test.

Assuming AMD is planning an RX 590, we're thinking it could be a 12nm spin or 14nm respin of Polaris with a subsequent clock bump and almost certainly still built at GlobalFoundries. Introducing a new Polaris GPU now lets AMD put a refresh on the board for 2018 and the first part of 2019, but it isn't a part that Lisa Su mentioned in her analyst call. Then again, AMD really isn't talking publicly about its consumer GPU plans at all right now. While GPUs(Opens in a new window) were frequently mentioned this week during the conference call, all of the discussion focused on data centers and the 7nm Vega ramp. If AMD is ramping an RX 590 now, it implies Navi will either be focused in a different market area (at least initially) or won't arrive for quite some time -- long enough not to collide with this product in the market.

What'll be interesting is to see if the upcoming GTX 1060 with GDDR5X can match it. We now know Gigabyte is launching one such card, and that the GPU inside is supposedly a cut-down GP104 identical to that used for the GTX 1080, GTX 1070 Ti, and GTX 1070. The new GTX 1060 with GDDR5X should have a faster RAM clock, but Gigabyte is playing coy on that front right now, claiming that the bandwidth is still the same as the original card -- 192GB/s. That seems extremely unlikely, given that the entire point of incorporating GDDR5X would be to improve overall bandwidth, but Gigabyte is giving itself room to adjust core clocks and memory frequency without disclosing that information just yet.