AMD’s Radeon RX 580 has been one of the chipmaker’s most popular video cards. Based on the Polaris architecture that debuted more than six years back, the RX 570/580 lineup keeps coming back from the abyss, courtesy of cryptominers and video card shortages. According to testing conducted by “Testing Gaming” it appears that AMD has been consistently optimizing its graphics drivers for Polaris. Over the last four years or so, the game performance of the RX 580 has improved by up to 18%.
The largest gains come from older titles such as Forza Horizon 4, Project Cards, The Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Battlefield 1. There are two ways to look at it. Either the Radeon RX 500 series was fairly unoptimized for some gams back then, or AMD has simply improved its software stack since then, or perhaps both. Regardless, the card holds up quite well in most modern games, delivering over 60 or close to 60 FPS with minor compromises in visual fidelity.
| Avg FPS (2017) | 1% Lows (2017) | 0.1% lows (2017) | Avg FPS (2021) | 1% Lows (2021) | 0.1% Lows (2021) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forza Horizon 4 | 72 | 60 | 57 | 85 (+ 18%) | 74 | 72 |
| GTA 5 | 65 | 52 | 50 | 69 (+ 6%) | 55 | 52 |
| Rainbow six siege | 130 | 103 | 73 | 143 (+ 10%) | 113 | 78 |
| Battlefield 1 | 75 | 34 | 10 | 84 (+ 12%) | 57 | 18 |
| Project cars | 73 | 69 | 63 | 83 (+ 14%) | 69 | 67 |
| RDR 2 | 35 | 30 | 18 | 39 (+ 11%) | 34 | 19 |
| PUBG | 85 | 71 | 63 | 90 (+ 6%) | 76 | 70 |
| The Witcher 3 | 63 | 54 | 49 | 69 (+ 10%) | 60 | 55 |
Overall, the performance gain across eight titles averages 10.7%, with the lows seeing an improvement of 13%. This means that getting a second-hand Radeon RX 580 isn’t really a bad idea, especially till the situation in the graphics card market improves. On the downside though, you won’t be able to take advantage of recently introduced technologies such as ray-tracing, mesh shading, variable-rate shading, etc. However, it’s still a better option than an integrated graphics solution if that’s all you’ve got right now. Unfortunately though, if you can’t find a 2nd hand SKU from a reliable source, then you’re pretty much screwed as the card is going for around $500 across most online retailers.
