AMD preparing for the release of the Radeon RX 590 GPU

While NVIDIA has been hogging all the news for PC gaming GPUs over the last few months with the release of its Turing-powered GeForce RTX cards, it seems that AMD has been prepping another GPU for the mainstream segment. According to new entries in the 3DMark performance database, a new card going by the name Radeon RX 590 is being tested and will likely be debuting on store shelves some time in the near future.

The 3DMark scores were first given notice by Reddit user /u/TUM_APISAK in a post made to the r/AMD subreddit. Based on the scores awarded and clock speeds listed in the database, it would appear that the Radeon RX 590 is yet another refresh of the Polaris architecture that originally debuted in the Radeon RX 480 nearly three years ago.

AMD’s Polaris architecture was released in two variants back in 2016 under the RX 480 and RX 470 banner. The cards used the same underlying GPU, but were sold at different clock speeds and with different amount of VRAM to hit specific market segments. A year later, AMD rebadged the cards as the Radeon RX 580 and RX 570. These 500-series cards were clocked a bit higher than their predecessors, but were ultimately the same GPU with around a five percent performance boost. These cards faced direct competition from NVIDIA’s GTX 1060 variants, though the pricing and availability of GPUs from either company was thrown into chaos thanks to the effects of last year’s cryptocurrency boom.

The current rumblings from the rumor mill indicate that the Radeon RX 590 is once again the same Polaris-based GPU design, but possibly running on an improved 12nm process that is allowing for higher clock speeds than we saw from the best of the RX 580 cards. The 3DMark scores indicate that this “new” GPU will be up to ten percent faster than the RX 500 series cards thanks to the higher clocks, likely putting it just ahead of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1060 6GB cards, but still a ways off from the GeForce GTX 1070.

As AMD has yet to confirm these new cards or even acknowledge the rumors, there is no concrete information on what this new GPU might cost or exactly when it might see release. At the time of this writing, 8GB RX 580 variants are selling at a range of $230-260 online. AMD would be wise to offer the new card at or below the current market prices if it hopes to cause any fanfare among PC gamers. Reliable information on the company's next generation GPU architecture is still in extremely short supply, so this Radeon RX 590 may be all that AMD fans have to look forward to until sometime later next year.