AMD's expected refresh of its RX 580 graphics card, known as the RX 590, may be launching within the next two weeks. The latest rumor suggests it will debut on November 15 and will have a price tag of $300. While that would make it more expensive than the RX 580 ($230) and the Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB ($280) it should be more powerful than both.
AMD hasn't released a new graphics card since its Vega 56 and 64 unveiling in late-2017 and it hasn't released a mid-range GPU since the start of that same year. The RX 590 isn't a new-generation and certainly isn't expected to be part of AMD's hotly anticipated Navi line up of GPUs -- those should be unveiled at CES 2019 -- but a refresh of its Polaris architecture.
Thought likely to be called the Polaris 30, the GPU at the core of the RX 590 will be clocked 10-20 percent higher than the RX 580, potentially delivering between 10 and 15 percent improvement in overall performance when combined with a die shrink to 12nm. That would give it near Fury X levels of performance and pitch it somewhere in between the GTX 1060 6GB and GTX 1070.
Since Nvidia has no real competition for that price point at this time, especially as part of its new RTX-generation of Turing graphics cards, this could give AMD an important new GPU for the holiday season 2018 -- especially if it can launch in mid-November.
A price tag of $300 isn't ideal -- $250 would make it a real killer card -- but even at that cost it would still be very competitive with Nvidia's offerings and until Navi debuts next year, could be the best mid-range card available.
