AMD Radeon RX 5700 8GB Review

1. Introduction2. AMD Radeon RX 5700 Reference Card3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy (1080p, 1440p, 4K)5. Battlefield V (1080p, 1440p, 4K)6. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (1080p, 1440p, 4K)7. Far Cry 5 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)8. Ghost Recon: Wildlands (1080p, 1440p, 4K)9. Metro: Exodus (1080p, 1440p, 4K)10. Middle Earth: Shadow of War (1080p, 1440p, 4K)11. Shadow of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 1440p, 4K)12. DX11 vs DX12 Scaling13. Clock Speed14. Temperatures15. Acoustics16. Power Consumption17. Overclocking18. Closing Thoughts19. View All Pages

July 7 marks a busy day for AMD, as it releases not only its new 7nm Ryzen 3000 processors, but two new 7nm graphics cards as well – the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT. Built on the new RDNA architecture, these cards are AMD's attempt to win back the mid-range market segment after its Radeon VII GPU wasn't able to topple Nvidia's RTX 2080 in the high-end earlier this year.

In this review we are focusing on the $349 RX 5700, but we also have a full review of the RX 5700 XT over here if you are interested. Going head to head with Nvidia's RTX 2060, can the RX 5700 come out on top?

When AMD gave us our first good look at the new cards back at E3, the Radeon RX 5700 was compared to Nvidia's RTX 2060 and its performance looked compelling. As a preemptive strike, however, Nvidia recently launched its new RTX 2060 SUPER and RTX 2070 SUPER graphics cards, which both offer decent performance increases over the original models.

Adding a further twist to proceedings, AMD announced on Friday that it has actually dropped pricing of both its new cards ahead of launch. The RX 5700 is now priced at $349, and the 5700 XT costs at $399, throwing a real spanner in the works as the 5700 is now competing against the 2060, not the 2060 SUPER as Nvidia had anticipated.

	RX 5700	RX 5700 XT	RX Vega 56	RX Vega 64	Radeon VII
Architecture	Navi	Navi	Vega 10	Vega 10	Vega 20
Manufacturing Process	7nm	7nm	14nm	14nm	7nm
Transistor Count	10.3 billion	10.3 billion	12.5 billion	12.5 billion	13.2 billion
Die Size	251mm²	251mm²	486mm²	495mm²	331mm²
Compute Units	36	40	56	64	60
Stream Processors	2304	2560	3584	4096	3840
Base GPU Clock	Up to 1465MHz	Up to 1605MHz	1156 MHz	1274 MHz	1400 MHz
Game GPU Clock	Up to 1625MHz	Up to 1755MHz	n/a	n/a	n/a
Boost GPU Clock	Up to 1725MHz	Up to 1905MHz	1471 MHz	1546 MHz	1750 MHz
Peak Engine Clock	n/a	n/a	1590 MHz	1630 MHz	1800 MHz
Peak SP Performance	Up to 7.95 TFLOPS	Up to 9.75 TFLOPS	Up to 10.5 TFLOPS	Up to 12.7 TFLOPS	Up to 14.2 TFLOPS
Peak Half Precision Performance	Up to 15.9 TFLOPS	Up to 19.5 TFLOPS	Up to 21.0 TFLOPS	Up to 25.3 TFLOPS	Up to 28.1 TFLOPS
Peak Texture Fill-Rate	Up to 248.4 GT/s	Up to 304.8 GT/s	Up to 330.0 GT/s	Up to 395.8 GT/s	432.24 GT/s
ROPs	64	64	64	64	64
Peak Pixel Fill-Rate	Up to 110.4 GP/s	Up to 121.9 GP/s	Up to 94.0 GP/s	Up to 98.9 GP/s	115.26 GP/s
Memory	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB HBM	8GB HBM	16GB HBM2
Memory Bandwidth	448 GB/s	448 GB/s	410 GB/s	483.8 GB/s	1 TB/s
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	2048-bit	2048-bit	4096-bit
Board Power	185W	225W	210W	295W	300W

Built on AMD's new RDNA architecture, the RX 5700 is the lesser of the two new Navi GPUs hitting the market. It sports 36 Compute Units (CUs), the design of which has been completely reworked for Navi, which is 4 less than its bigger brother, the RX 5700 XT. Each CU is home to 64 stream processors, therefore the RX 5700 has 2304 of those.

The Navi GPU is fabricated on TSMC's 7nm process, which not only means a physically smaller die size for both new cards – 251mm², versus 486mm² for Vega 56, for instance – but higher clock speeds as well. Base clock for the RX 5700 is rated at 1465MHz, with a boost of up to 1725MHz. Interestingly, AMD is also touting a new ‘game clock', the frequency which you can expect to see the card hit while gaming. For the RX 5700, its game clock is 1625MHz.

On top of these developments, Navi also marks AMD's shift away from High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), for its mid-range cards at least. Both RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT sport the latest GDDR6 memory, running at the same 14Gbps that we have become used to with Nvidia's RTX series of cards. Over a 256-bit bus, this provides 448 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Lastly, total board power for the RX 5700 is rated at 185W. This is 10W than the rated Total Graphics Power (TGP) of the RTX 2060 SUPER.

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