Graphics cards/Comparison
13 specifications
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 vs AMD Radeon RX 590
On paper, the AMD Radeon RX 590 has more shading units. Specifications describe what each card is designed to do; how much of that either one holds under continuous load is a separate question.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070
NVIDIA · GeForce GTX 10 · Desktop
AMD Radeon RX 590
AMD · Radeon RX 500 · Desktop
Compute
Memory
Power and platform
A check marks the higher figure only on rows where higher is unambiguously better. Rows without one are not ties; they are specifications where “better” has no meaning.
Reading the table
What the difference means.
2 years apart
The RX 590 (Radeon RX 500, 2018) is 2 years newer than the GTX 1070 (Pascal, 2016). A newer architecture brings more than speed: newer video encoders and decoders, newer upscaling and frame generation, and a longer run of driver updates ahead of it.
Video memory
Both carry 8 GB, so neither has the advantage where memory is the limit: high resolutions, heavy textures and local AI models fill both at the same point.
Shading units
The counts differ, 2,304 against 1,920, but these are different designs from different makers, and a shading unit on one is not the same amount of work as on the other. The row cannot be used to rank this pair.
What no table says
How much of its speed a graphics card keeps after the first minute depends on the cooling and the power limit of the machine it is in. If you own one of these, measure it: the test is free and runs in this browser.
Questions
- Is the GTX 1070 better than the RX 590?
- On the specifications they are closely matched. They are different designs, so the raw counts cannot rank them. Frame rates depend on the game and its settings, and how much speed either card keeps after ten minutes depends on its cooling, which is what a sustained test measures.
- Can the GTX 1070 and the RX 590 be compared on these figures alone?
- Only in part. The board power is not verified for one of the two, so that row cannot rank them. They are different designs, so counts such as shading units do not convert one to one. Running the same sustained graphics test on each machine gives a figure that can be compared directly.
More comparisons
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 vs AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 vs AMD Radeon RX 580
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 vs AMD Radeon RX 5700
- AMD Radeon RX 590 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER
- AMD Radeon RX 590 vs AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT
- AMD Radeon RX 590 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070
- AMD Radeon RX 590 vs AMD Radeon RX 5700
- AMD Radeon RX 590 vs AMD Radeon RX 580
Every figure on this table is a design target. None of it is a measurement.
Nothing above describes how a graphics card behaves twenty minutes into a sustained workload, which is where two chips with nearly identical specifications routinely diverge. A boost clock is a ceiling the vendor permits, not a rate the chip sustains, and whether it holds depends on the cooling, the case, the power profile and the room. None of those appear on a specification sheet.
We deliberately do not reduce these figures to a single score. A composite invented from specifications would look authoritative and measure nothing, and choosing the weights would be choosing the winner.