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AMD Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT: Blazing new trails

The Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics cards represent a fresh start and a bright future for AMD, brimming with technologies that have never been seen in GPUs before.

The Radeon RX 5700 series are the first mainstream GPUs built using the bleeding-edge 7nm manufacturing process (hence their July 7 launch). They’re the first graphics cards packing the ultra-fast PCIe 4.0 interface. They’re the first graphics cards crafted with AMD’s all-new “RDNA” architecture, which delivers a massive power efficiency boost that Radeon’s been needing for years. They’re packing fresh display technologies to enable 4K, 144Hz monitors without the need for messy chroma subsampling. They’ve upgraded to GDDR6 memory. Heck, AMD even managed to tame their blower-style cooler design, learning from the mistakes of the frankly unpleasant-to-be-around Vega 64.

Nvidia tried to spoil their launch with the surprise release of the excellent GeForce RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super (see page 43), but some aggressive pre-launch price cuts by AMD foiled that plan. The $350 Radeon RX 5700 and $400 Radeon RX 5700 XT are great graphics cards, full stop.

SPECS AND FEATURES

Warning: With so much new technology baked into the Radeon RX 5700 series, this is going to be a long review. We’re going to kick it off by talking about what’s fresh under the hood. Got it? Good. On to the cool stuff.

Let’s examine the hardware, before delving into new software features later. Here’s an AMD-supplied list of technological specifications for the Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT, alongside the same stats for the Radeon RX Vega GPUs they’re replacing in AMD’s product stack. (Radeon boss Scott Herkelman confirmed that Vega will be disappearing in The Full Nerd interview here.)

While that table (see page 61 and above) provides a helpful overview, note that you cannot simply compare the number of compute units and stream processors between the Vega GPUs and the “Navi” GPUs in the Radeon RX 5700 series. Compared to AMD’s long-lasting GCN architecture (which Vega is based on), the new RDNA architecture introduces several radical changes to the underlying GPU design, unleashing significant hardware-level overhauls to everything from the cache to the graphics engine to the compute units themselves. These new graphics cards perform tasks differently from their predecessors at a fundamental level.

We’re not going to get into the weeds of redesigned cache hierarchies and SIMD Wave cycles here. If you want an insightful yet understandable explanation of the major RDNA architecture changes and have 23 minutes to spare, I highly recommend watching the Gamers Nexus interview with technology analyst David Kanter. It’s great.

AMD says that between the RDNA tweaks and the shift to the 7nm manufacturing process, its new cards are much more powerful and power-efficient than before—claims that bear fruit in our testing. (Spoiler alert: Navi is even more power-efficient than Nvidia’s Turing architecture, a monumental reversal

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