AMD Radeon RX 540 vs AMD Radeon RX Vega 6 (Ryzen 4000/5000) vs AMD Radeon RX 590 (Desktop)

AMD Radeon RX 540

The AMD Radeon RX 540 is mobile mid-range graphics card for laptops based on the Polaris 12 chip (most likely). It is manufactured in an improved 14 nm FinFET process at Globalfoundries. The performance should be between the Radeon Pro 450 and 455 in the MacBook Pro 2016 range that is also based on the Polaris architecture. AMD specifies the RX 450 at 1.2 TFLOPS (Pro 450 1 TFLOP, Pro 455 1.3 TFLOPs). Compared to Nvidia graphics cards, the gaming performance should be between the GeForce GTX 950M and GTX 960M.

The features of the Radeon RX 540 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. Due to the slower specs, the Radeon RX 540 use slightly less.

AMD Radeon RX Vega 6 (Ryzen 4000/5000)

The AMD Radeon RX Vega 6 is an integrated GPU for notebooks. It is used in certain Ryzen 5 APUs of the Renoir generation (Ryzen 4000 Mobile), which were launched in early 2020. The iGPU is based on the Vega architecture (5th generation GCN) and has 6 CUs (= 384 of the 512 shaders) clocked at up to 1,500 MHz. Compared to the similar Radeon RX Vega 6 in the Raven Ridge generation (Ryzen 2000 Mobile), the GPU is clocked significantly higher (1.500 versus 1.100 MHz Boost).

The performance depends on the configured TDP (12-54 W at launch), the clocks, the cooling, and the memory configuration). The GPU should benefit from fast dual-channel DDR4-3200 RAM (contrary to DDR4-2133 single-channel, which is also possible).

The Vega architecture offers some improvements over the Polaris generation and now supports DirectX 12 Feature Level 12_1. More information is available in our dedicated article about the Raven Ridge architecture.

The performance is clearly faster than the old RX Vega 6 thanks to the higher clock speed and faster main memory (if used). In first synthetic benchmarks, the Vega 6 was able to reach the performance of a dedicated GeForce MX150. In games it should be somewhere between a GeForce MX230 and MX150.

Thanks to the modern 7nm process and clever power-saving features, the power consumption is comparatively low (according to AMD), so the graphics adapter can also be used for slim and light notebooks.

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).