AMD has announced the first two of its Navi cards for PC gamers, the AMD Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT. These two mid-range graphics cards aim to take on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 and RTX 2070, respectively.
This news comes out of AMD's Next Horizon Gaming event at E3 2019, where the company went into more detail as to what we can expect from its AMD Navi graphics processor (GPU) technology.
- How will AMD Navi compete with Nvidia Turing?
- Will we see these GPUs in the best gaming laptops?
- Be sure to check out the best PC games
What we do have are specs. The AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT will feature 40 compute units, with 2,560 stream processors and a boost clock of 1,905MHz. This GPU will also feature 8GB of GDDR6 video memory (VRAM) with 14Gbps of memory bandwidth. Completing the package are 64 render output units (ROPs) and 256 texture units.
As for the lower-end AMD Radeon RX 5700, you're getting 36 compute units, packed with 2,304 stream processors and a boost clock of 1,725 MHz. It features the same 8GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit bus, along with identical ROPs and texture units.
AMD brought the Radeon RX 5700 XT on stage in a demo against the RTX 2070, where it bested Nvidia's mid-range card in World War Z by about 10%. As for the lower-end AMD Radeon RX 5700, it fared even better against the RTX 2060 with Apex Legends.
These GPUs will be on store shelves on July 7, with the Radeon RX 5700 XT priced at $449 (about £350, AU$650) and the RX 5700 at $379 (about £300, AU$550). Given that AMD is comparing the GPUs' performance to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 and RTX 2060, which are both more expensive, that looks like very competitive pricing.
The time is now
Navi has been anticipated for a while now, and people will finally be able to get their hands on this new graphics processing technology.
The AMD Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT are coming straight for the throats of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 and RTX 2070, respectively. And, at their price points, the lack of ray tracing won't matter so much.
Because AMD was able to undercut comparable Turing cards, we can see Team Red taking a significant slice of the graphics card market. That's not to mention the rumors that we could see up to five AMD Navi graphics cards this year – if that's true, AMD might take on the popular GTX 1660 Ti, and that's a battle we'd like to see.
It should be noted, however, that this is the only the first generation of AMD's new RDNA graphics architecture, and if it's anything like GCN, we'll see Team Red steadily improve on it over the next few years.
Either way, the AMD vs Nvidia battle is heating up, just like the Intel vs AMD tussle before – we'll just have to wait and see how this one plays out come July.
- These graphics cards will probably be in the best gaming PCs
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