AMD Radeon RX 570 (Laptop) vs AMD Radeon RX 590 (Desktop) vs AMD Radeon RX 540

AMD Radeon RX 570 (Laptop)

The AMD Radeon RX 570 for laptops (RX 570M) is a mid-range Polaris 10 gaming graphics card for laptops. It was first shown at CES 2017 in the Samsung Odyssey gaming notebook as an alternative to the GeForce GTX 1070. According to preliminary specifications from Samsung, the supposed RX 570M will ship in 4 GB and 8 GB GDDR5 VRAM variants. The RX 570M is expected to be a rebrand of the old RX 470 for laptops with the possibility of small bumps to the clock speed and/or shader count. As a result, gaming performance should be similar or slower to its desktop version. The Nvidia equivalent will likely be the GeForce GTX 1060 or GeForce 1050 Ti based on performance predictions.

More information on the Polaris architecture and its features can be found here.

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).

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.