Lending more and more credence to the rumor that AMD is set to unveil a Polaris 30-refresh of its RX 580 graphics card, called the RX 590, a leak from ASUS, via VideoCardz, has informed us that the company is bringing back its ROG STRIX brand for the RX 590 exclusively. It will have the same 8GB of GDDR5 as the standard RX 590, but with better cooling may come increased clock speeds and higher performance too.
Built on a 12nm die shrink of the Polaris 20 GPU found in the RX 500 series of graphics cards, the RX 590 isn't a major refresh, but should offer a 10-15 percent performance improvement for around the same price. Early 3DMark benchmarking suggests it will have a 200MHz core-clock increase, which could be further improved by aftermarket overclocking and cooler improvements from third-party manufacturers.
ASUS Strix design is likely to have such cooling enhancements, so we wouldn't be surprised to see it eek out an extra 50MHz or so to provide an even greater performance boost. Such a card would be a perfect mid-range option for those who can't afford a GTX 1080, or RTX 2080, which are hundreds of dollars more expensive and though powerful, aren't exactly groundbreaking at this point.
Neither is the Polaris 30, of course, but it's not designed to be. It will be noticeably more powerful than the GTX 1060 which Nvidia is still marketing and selling for around $270, $50 more than the RX 580. The RX 590 should easily outstrip the 1060 in terms of performance and may come in drastically cheaper too. If that's the case, until Nvidia releases a GTX 2060 -- and even then it probably won't be competitive on price -- the RX 590 is likely to become the best mid-range graphics card available.
