AMD Radeon RX 5700XT and RX 5700 launch on July 7 for $449 and $379

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AMD unveiled its first Navi graphics cards at E3. The manufacturer is positioning the Radeon RX 5700XT and RX 5700 against Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2070 and RTX 2060. However, AMD video cards do not have ray tracing hardware on board.

AMD Radeon RX 5700XT

Both video cards are based on the same GPU, but the XT model has more compute units and higher clock speeds. That RX 5700XT uses the full Navi 10 GPU; the same chip is used for the RX 5700, but with some compute units disabled and lower clock speeds.

The cards have GPUs from the new Navi family and are based on the RDNA architecture. The first generation of that new architecture has no hardware support for ray tracing. AMD is going to release video cards with hardware ray tracing in the future, like Nvidia is doing now. That will happen with the next generation of RDNA architecture. Microsoft announced earlier this week that its Xbox Project Scarlett has such a next-gen RDNA GPU, with hardware ray tracing support. That console will be released at the end of 2020, and there may also be AMD video cards for desktops with ray tracing cores.

The Radeon RX 5700 GPUs are the first consumer video cards with PCI-e 4.0 support. To make use of this, a motherboard and processor is needed that also support it. Currently, this is only possible on the AM4 platform with a Ryzen 3000 processor and X570 motherboard. In practice, pci-e 4.0 will offer no advantage with the RX 5700 cards. The bandwidth of pci-e 3.0 is not a limitation with these video cards. The cards are backwards compatible and therefore also work in PCI-e 3.0 slots.

AMD announced the video cards during its presentation at the E3 game fair, which can be followed via a live stream. The manufacturer also showed benchmarks of popular games, in which the RX 5700XT in 1440p resolution and ultra settings beats the RTX 2070. The consumption of the Radeon cards is higher on paper; they have a tdp of 225W and 180W. With the Nvidia counterparts, that is 175W and 160W.

With suggested retail prices of $449 and $379, the prices of the Radeon cards aren’t much different from the current prices of their Nvidia counterparts. The RTX 2070 is in the Pricewatch from about 470 euros and RTX 2060 cards are available from about 350 euros. The euro prices of the AMD cards are not yet known, but converted with the addition of VAT, the prices come to 480 and 405 euros.

Radeon RX 5700XT Radeon RX 5700
GPU Navi 10 Navi 10
Process 7nm 7nm
Compute units 40 36
Stream Processors 2560 2304
Boost Clock 1905MHz 1725MHz
Game Clock 1755MHz 1625MHz
Base Clock 1605MHz 1465MHz
Memory 8GB gddr6 8GB gddr6
Memory bus 256bit 256bit
Memory Speed 14Gbit/s 14Gbit/s
Memory bandwidth 448Gbit/s 448Gbit/s
TDP (board power) 225W 180W
price $449 $379

AMD also comes with a special RX 5700XT edition in honor of its 50th anniversary. That version gets a higher boost clock of 1980MHz, a gameclock of 1830MHz and a baseclock of 1680MHz. Furthermore, the specifications are the same, although AMD has not announced what the TDP of the special version is. The anniversary model is sold only through AMD.com and costs $499.

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