AMD call it Polaris refined, but to all intents and purposes, RX 570 and RX 580 are indeed upclocked versions of their predecessors. There's the same complement of 32 and 36 compute units respectively, power efficiency is diminished in the quest for higher frequencies and by extension, the emphasis this time is on increased performance. And to be frank, that's fine with us - just don't go into a 570/580 purchase thinking you're getting the new AMD Vega technology, because you're not.
That said, AMD gets a lot of heat for what are often palmed off as 'rebrands', but at the end of the day, we all buy new gaming graphics cards because we're looking for a boost to gaming frame-rates, or the ability to run at higher resolutions with richer visual effects in play. Looking over the benchmark data, it seems that AMD's primary aim with the RX 580 is to more closely challenge the GTX 1060 as the performance winner in the mainstream GPU sector, while pushing RX 570 up to and beyond GTX 970 frame-rates, giving both GTX 1050 Ti and the 3GB version of the GTX 1060 a run for their money..
For the purposes of this review, AMD sent us three samples - at the lower end, we have the Asus Strix RX 570, its 32 compute units reaching a maximum of 1300MHz. Alongside it, we have two RX 480s - factory-overclocked Sapphire and MSI samples. The Sapphire sample in particular is fascinating owing to a mammoth, weighty heat sink arrangement and boost clocks that hit a remarkable 1450MHz with no overclocking required. These are frequencies higher than any Polaris card we've seen before, and 57MHz faster than the MSI's maximum 'out of the box' clocks.
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