XFX Radeon RX 590 Fatboy review: Pedal to the heavy metal

How can improvements to the GPU manufacturing process make graphics cards better? There’s no one solution, and today’s launch of the $280 Radeon RX 590 shows that Nvidia and AMD took two wildly divergent paths in the shift to the 12nm process.Nvidia’s used the extra space and process improvements to cram its GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards with radical, futuristic hardware devoted to driving adoption of real-time ray tracing and machine learning in games. The downside? The cheapest RTX option, the RTX 2070, starts at $500. AMD took a different tack: The Radeon RX 590 is essentially identical to the $240 8GB Radeon RX 580 under the hood, but shifting from 14nm to 12nm let AMD eke out much higher clock speeds than before—and prep a new graphics card that challenges the massive price gap between the $250 GTX 1060 and $370 GTX 1070.To read this article in full, please click here