AMD announces the Radeon RX 5600 XT to dominate 1080p gaming at CES 2020

(Image credit: AMD)

AMD's naming scheme made it all but apparent that the company would be coming out with a Radeon RX 5600-series graphics processor to slot between the RX 5500- and RX 5700-series GPUs. Sure enough, AMD announced just that at its press event for CES 2020.

Specifically, AMD announced the Radeon RX 5600 XT. It touts the new graphics processor as the ultimate choice for 1080p gaming, with enough power to handle recent AAA games at max settings while delivering over 60 fps.

The specs

The Radeon RX 5600 XT runs on the same RDNA architecture found in the RX 5500 and RX 5700 cards. It offers up 36 compute units running at a up to 1,560MHz boost clock and aiming for 1,375MHz as AMD's Game Clock. The cards will include 6GB of GDDR6 VRAM.

AMD showed the new graphics card boasting 92 fps for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, 88 fps for The Division 2 and 87 fps for Gears of Wars 5. Those framerates show the RX 5600 XT beating out the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti by a decent margin, and the new AMD card happens to cost the exact same price as its Nvidia counterpart: $279 (about £210, AU$400) .

AMD also wants to target competitive online titles. It showed the RX 5600 XT hitting 124 fps in Apex Legends, 126 fps in Fortnite and 147 fps in World of Warcraft: Battle For Azeroth.

The new graphics card from AMD is shaping up nicely to compete with Nvidia in the mid-range graphics card market. And, it will do so soon, as AMD has set a launch date of January 21, with the card coming from all of AMD's AIB partners.

A mobile version, the Radeon RX 5600M, was also announced for a launch in the first half of 2020 alongside a Radeon RX 5700M. These two new mobile graphics processor will likely play a large role in AMD's deeper push into the mobile computing space in 2020 alongside its Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs.

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Mark Knapp

Over the last several years, Mark has been tasked as a writer, an editor, and a manager, interacting with published content from all angles. He is intimately familiar with the editorial process from the inception of an article idea, through the iterative process, past publishing, and down the road into performance analysis.