Radeon RX 590

The Radeon RX 590 is the top-end Polaris card in AMD's RX 500 series, launched in late 2018 and built on a 12nm process node — a shrink from the 14nm used by the RX 580. It offers a clock speed advantage over the RX 580 while retaining the same Polaris 20 architecture and memory configuration.

The RX 590 ships with 8GB of GDDR5 on a 256-bit bus, with a TDP around 225W requiring two power connectors. It supports DirectX 12, Vulkan, and AMD FreeSync. The Polaris architecture does not include hardware ray tracing or dedicated AI acceleration, and these features were not added with the 12nm revision.

Designed to close the gap with competing midrange NVIDIA cards of the time, the RX 590 targets solid 1080p gaming at high settings with more performance overhead than the RX 580. It suits gamers who want to push higher frame rates at 1080p or handle 1440p in moderately demanding titles, and benefits from the same large 8GB VRAM buffer that extended the usefulness of the RX 580.