Introduction

AMD today announced the Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" series of graphics cards, to have a go at the all-important price-performance sweetspot segment, a narrow and crowded price-band running between $350 to $500. Most serious PC gamers pick up graphics cards from this segment to play their AAA titles at maximum settings and resolutions ranging from the most-popular 1080p to 1440p, which continues to grow in adoption due to monitors getting more affordable. NVIDIA has taken a two-pronged approach to this segment. It introduced the GeForce GTX 16-series that lacks ray-tracing capabilities but is fast enough for 1080p and beyond, while the RTX 2060 is just about fast enough to play anything at 1440p and includes raytracing. In an attempt to preempt Navi RX 5700, the company even introduced the RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super. AMD in response did last-minute touch-ups to its launch prices, and hence, we have the $349 Radeon RX 5700.

The Radeon RX 5700 in this review is part of a series that includes the more powerful $399 RX 5700 XT, reviewed here separately. The two are based on the swanky new "Navi 10" silicon from AMD built on the 7 nm silicon fabrication process at TSMC. "Navi 10" is AMD's second 7 nm GPU after the "Vega 20". It's purpose-built for the client segment and uses more conventional technologies, such as new GDDR6 memory in place of the expensive and complicated HBM2. 7 nm isn't the only buzzword as there's also support for the latest PCI-Express 4.0 bus standard, which is being debuted on AMD's "Valhalla" desktop platform that consists of 3rd generation Ryzen processors and motherboards based on the AMD X570 chipset. This is hence a very big day for AMD as it's launching new products across nearly all of its client-segment brands.



At $349, the Radeon RX 5700 is price-matched with the original GeForce RTX 2060. You have a heftier specifications list if you don't miss RTX: 8 GB of 256-bit GDDR6 memory and 64 ROPs (the RTX 2060 gives you 6 GB of 192-bit GDDR6 memory and 48 ROPs). The extra memory amount may offer some future-proofing if some games lock out the highest graphics settings for not having at least 8 GB of video memory. This was the first thing NVIDIA addressed with its $399 GeForce RTX 2060 Super.

"Navi" isn't an exercise at shrinking existing AMD GPU IP to 7 nm (which is what "Vega 20" was). It introduces RDNA, a brand new compute unit design that aims to increase IPC by double-digit percentages without losing the things that made the older Graphics Core Next (GCN) technology ace general-purpose compute. The RX 5700 is carved out of the "Navi 10" silicon by disabling four compute units out of 40. You end up with 2,304 stream processors and 144 TMUs. The ROP count is unchanged at 64 ROPs, as is the memory amount, bus-width, and frequency. In this review, we put the Radeon RX 5700 through our entire selection of games to test not just its performance but also energy efficiency and noise.

Our exhaustive coverage of AMD's 7/7 Launch Day includes the following content:
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-core processor | AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-core processor | AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card | AMD Radeon RX 5700 graphics card | AMD Zen 2 Memory Performance Scaling | Ryzen 3900X and 3700 on X470 vs X570 platforms | Radeon RX 5700 XT Navi PCI-Express 4.0 Performance Scaling | ASRock X570 Taichi motherboard | ASUS Prime X570-Pro motherboard