AMD Radeon RX 550 (Laptop) vs AMD Radeon RX 570 (Desktop) vs AMD Radeon RX 590 (Desktop)

AMD Radeon RX 550 (Laptop)

The AMD Radeon RX 550 is mobile mid-range graphics card for laptops based on the Polaris 12 chip . It is manufactured in an improved 14 nm FinFET process at Globalfoundries or Samsung. The Polaris 12 chip (codename Lexa) is a smaller chip than the Polaris 11 and 21 and uses the improved 14nm process that allows higher clock rates than the first generation (Radeon RX 400 series). It features 640 shaders (10 CUs) and (at least in the Pavilion 15t) all cores are activated in the mobile version (where 512 are activated in the desktop RX 550).

According to the specified peak performance, the chip should be similar fast as a Radeon Pro 455 in the MacBook Pro 2016. In our tests it reaches the Radeon Pro 455 and bests the Nvidia GeForce MX150, but stays behind the GeForce GTX 1050.

The features of the Radeon RX 550 are identical to the faster RX 460 and all other Polaris chips. See more details on the Polaris architecture here.

The power envelope of the faster Radeon Pro 460 is rated at 35 Watt according to the AMD blog post. In our tests with The Witcher 3, the GPU needed in the Pavilion 15t 80 Watt and positiones itself between the much more power efficient MX150 and the GTX 1050.

AMD Radeon RX 570 (Desktop)

The AMD Radeon RX 570 is a mainstream graphics card for desktop PCs. It was announced in April 2017 and is based on the Polaris 20 chip. It is a refresh of the RX 470 and uses the same chip as the RX 580 (and 580X) with less shaders. The clock speeds are specified as 1,168 - 1,244 (Boost). The VRAM is connected by a 256 Bit bus and clocks at 1,750 MHz (effective 7,000 MHz) which leads to a 224 GB/s memory bandwidth.

At launch, the performance of the Radeon RX 570 was slightly below a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060. Therefore, the GPU is best used for 1920x1080 and high detail settings for demanding games of 2019.

The TDP of the Radeon RX 570 is specified with 120 Watts by AMD, so a single 6-pin power connector is sufficient.

AMD Radeon RX 590 (Desktop)

The AMD Radeon RX 590 is a desktop graphics card positioned in the mid-range of 2018. It is manufactured in 12nm and offers 2,304 shader cores and 8 GB GDDR5 VRAM using a 256 Bit memory interface (8 GHz, 256 GB/s).

The RX590 uses the new Polaris 30 chip, which is a 12nm version of the Polaris 20 chip of the RX 580. Thanks to the improved process, the clock rates of the RX 590 can be higher at a similar power consumption. 

This leads to a 10 percent higher performance compared against the older Radeon RX 580 and therefore the RX 590 is faster than the GeForce GTX 1060. This means that the card is best suited for 1080p gaming in max. details (of 2018 games).

The power consumption is rated at 175 Watt and therefore 10 Watts below the Radeon RX 580 (185 Watt).