AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB Review

1. Introduction2. AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT 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

Alongside the launch of its new Ryzen 3000 processors, AMD is also releasing two new graphics cards in the shape of the Radeon RX 5700, and the RX 5700 XT. Rather than going after the high-end market segment, these cards are targeting the £350-450 market segment – so they're far from entry-level, but neither are they rivalling the likes of the RTX 2080 or 2080 Ti.

We have launch day reviews of both cards, but this article is all about the RX 5700 XT. If you want to read our coverage of the RX 5700 you can do so over here, but in this review everything boils down to one question – is the RX 5700 XT a worthy competitor to Nvidia's RTX 2060 SUPER?

AMD's Radeon RX 5700 XT was meant to go head-to-head with the RTX 2070, but only this week saw the release of the new RTX 2070 SUPER, raising the bar that bit higher for AMD's new card. We had a further plot twist on Friday, when AMD announced that it had actually cut pricing of the new cards – with the RX 5700 coming in at $349, and the 5700 XT now at $399.

I have to say, this is a ballsy move on AMD's behalf, and it really ups the ante – 5700 XT is now going head to head with 2060 SUPER, while 5700 competes directly against the original RTX 2060.

	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

Both of AMD's new graphics cards are built upon its latest RDNA architecture, the long-awaited successor to Graphics Core Next (GCN). These cards use the same Navi GPU, where the RX 5700 XT is a full implementation with 40 Compute Units (CUs) and 2560 stream processors. RX 5700 is cut down slightly, to 36 CUs and 2304 stream processors.

A lot has been made of AMD's move to a new 7nm process for these cards – hence the 7/7 release date – and one consequence of this is a much smaller die size for the Navi GPU. Where the 14nm Vega 64 GPU die measures 495mm², Navi is just 251mm², and AMD claims a 2.3x performance per area increase for Navi vs Vega 10.

On top of this, clock speeds have been cranked up, with base clock increases from 1274MHz for Vega 64, up to 1605MHz for RX 5700 XT. AMD is also introducing a new clock speed metric known as ‘game clock', meaning the frequency which you can expect to see the card hit while gaming, and for the 5700 XT that is up to 1755MHz.

Interestingly, AMD is no longer equipping its cards with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), instead opting for 8GB of GDDR6 memory with a 256-bit bus. Total memory bandwidth comes in at 448GB/s.

Lastly, total board power for the 5700 XT is rated at 225W, down from 295W for Vega 64 – AMD is claiming a 1.5x performance per watt increase for the new cards.

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