The AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT & RX 5700 Review: Navi Renews Competition in the Midrange Market
by Ryan Smith on July 7, 2019 12:00 PM ESTMeet the Radeon RX 5700 XT & Radeon RX 5700
The true stars of today's launch are, of course, the new Radeon cards themselves. For today’s launch AMD is going completely reference, and that goes for their partners as well. So what you’ll see here is what you’ll get, in terms of features, design, and performance.
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bananaforscale - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
I expected to be buying a 2070 Super next, but now I'm absolutely waiting for third party cards on both sides. Didn't expect 5700XT to have a lower power draw than 2070S under full load either.Skiddywinks - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
It's the slightly slower than a 2070S but 20% better perf/cost that's got me.Will have to see how those numbers stack up with the third party cards. But the XT is looking better than I expected.
Kevin G - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Given the pricing structure, AMD as initially targeting the RTX 2070 performance for the RX 5700 and the result point to a victory in that comparison. The gotcha is that nVidia went Super and AMD has pre-emtpively dropped prices. The result is that what was the performance at $599 nine months ago from nVidia can now be hand for $399 from AMD. Street pricing over time should be more interesting as AMD has more room to move downward while boosting performance over time with some driver updates. Due to the restructuring of nVidia's line up, the RX 5700XT isn't a clear win but certainly not a wrong choice to make.Huh, I wonder what feature set AMD has for HDMI for it not work at boot on your workbench. Makes me wonder what would happen with this card in a 2010 Mac Pro which exhibits similar display oddities with 3rd party GPUs at boot.
Drivers do need some polish looking at the benchmark data. Strange Brigade's 99th percentile numbers are very similar at 1440p and 1080p where the averages are more divergent. Chances are that there is a hiccup there that might be able to be flattened out. Similarly the synthetic numbers are troublesome and point to a driver issue: the buffer compression figures indicate, well, that there is buffer compression going on. Vega on the other hand has a small amount going on which helps. I'd be really curious if compression data from real games can be extracted to fully isolate it to drivers. Also how well do Vulkan games run? I know it isn't part of the normal test bench any cursory data on this API support with the launch drivers?
imaheadcase - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
AMD has never been known for good drivers, or slow to fix stuff. I doubt they have more room to move downward, they pretty much knew the pricing of cards at release and made it seem like it price drop.For a brand new "cheap" pc build these be ok cards, but if already got a decent nvidia gpu no reason at all to upgrade to it, considering the time it takes AMD to catch up in hardware, they always fall back behind for years.
just4U - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Wait... what? I am sitting on last gen 1080s(sli) and Vega's(cf) and while I don't see any card out there I want besides the Vega VII currently.. to suggest these would only be good in a "cheap" build is nonsense.mapesdhs - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
imaheadcase, you're out of date re drivers, AMD has more reliable drivers these days, and (it seems) generally better image quality, hence why Google chose AMD over NVIDIA for Stadia. There's always an exception of course, Radeon VII's launch drivers were awful, that card was launched two weeks too early.haukionkannel - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
True... AMD drivers have been better than Nvidia drivers for a some time and that is small miracle considering how big programming team Nvidia has... wonder what They have been doing lately? Optimising RT performance?tamalero - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
The usual, gaining exclusives by optimizing the games FOR their hardware first.zodiacfml - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
I guess the choice of games matter.Korguz - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
yep.. and i dont play any of the games tested.. so.. to attempt to choose a new vid card.. will be interesting....