AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT

A compelling blend of 7nm technology, RDNA architecture updates, and a last-minute price drop

- Jarred Walton

AFTER MONTHS OF WAITING and speculation, AMD’s Radeon RX 5700 XT is finally here, joining the ranks of the best graphics cards. Sporting a new RDNA architecture that boosts performance while reducing power requirements, and with a price drop to keep AMD competitive with Nvidia’s new RTX 2060 Super, expectations from the faithful have been high. This is AMD’s first new GPU architecture since 2012, and the company has focused on improving efficiency, reworking the Compute Units to boost utilization and performance, and shifting to TSMC’s 7nm process technology.

All three RX 5700 models use the same Navi 10 GPU, with the 5700 XT cards sporting fully enabled chips, while the RX 5700 disables four CUs and 256 cores. Clock speeds also vary, but the GDDR6 memory in all cases runs at 14Gb/s. The new Navi 10 GPUs end up with a die size slightly larger than the previous Polaris GPUs, with only a few extra CUs. However, each CU has been reworked with the new RDNA architecture, and the result is that even with fewer cores, the RX 5700 XT easily outperforms the Vega 64—and does so using substantially less power.