Biostar has just revealed a brand new, white graphics card based on the AMD Radeon RX 580. Yes, a graphics card that first launched back in 2018 can now be yours again. It’s aimed very clearly at the budget and low-end GPU market, but is this a card worth buying today?
Answering that question is tricky. The Radeon RX 580 might have been a good budget option a few years back, but other than a white shell, there isn’t much that makes this old-but-new AMD GPU a good option for gamers now. Even the best budget gaming PC options today have long since moved on to better cards like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060.
This isn’t the first time Biostar has released an older card to give it a second wind, though. Back in 2022, when the world was facing chip shortages, Biostar released a new Radeon RX 550 card into the market, based on a GPU that was five years old at that time, and at a premium. We’re over those shortages, so the same rationale (such as it is) would be harder to explain today.
Looking at the specs, this Biostar Radeon RX 580 uses the revised version of the original RX 580 (launched a year earlier in 2017) that contains 2,048 streaming processors. It has two HDMI ports, 8GB of GDDR5 VRAM, and it supports DirectX 12.
This is a GPU that, according to the most recent Steam hardware survey, only has 0.52% of the market share left. At 1080p today, your performance will certainly be towards the low end, but much will depend on the game itself. You won’t have any trouble running Roblox, for example, but Cyberpunk 2077 at decent settings will be out of the question.
There’s also another problem for games to overcome, as the RX 580 is no longer supported in AMD’s main driver update branch, with the last driver released in March 2024. You’ll need to trust older or third-party drivers for this card going forward, so don’t expect much optimization on new Windows updates.
There’s no pricing for this card at the moment, but other Radeon RX 580 cards seem to ship for under $100. In Biostar’s own press release, the company talks about “casual gamers” and “mid-range enthusiasts”. Mid-range is stretching it, but a casual gamer might still do okay with a very cheap build based on this budget GPU. It’s not one of the best graphics card options today by a long way, though.
That said, there’s no denying that the shelf life for this card is limited, even for casual 1080p gamers. With no new driver support and architecture that gets older by the day, you’ll be better off checking out our AMD Radeon RX 7600 review if you’re thinking about your next graphics card. It’s a bit more expensive, but for under $300, at least you’ll still see a few more years out of it at 1080p.