20 OCTOBER 2019|COMPUTERSHOPPER|ISSUE 380
at both 1080pand 1440p. Still, you should
get higher than that if you have abetter CPU
than our test PC’s Intel Core i7-4770K, and
4K allows foralot more headroom. At this
resolution, the RX 5700 XT produced 105fps,
5fps higher than the RTX2070.
WISE INVESTMENT
Lastly,the RX 5700 XT easily attained a
perfect score of 11 in the SteamVR
Performance Test. This card will therefore run
any VR game on the market, at high quality,
for90fps or higher.This, however,brings us
on to acertain oddity: AMD is amember of
the VirtualLink Consortium, an organisation
promoting the VirtualLink connectivity
standard forVRheadsets, but there’s no
VirtualLink port on the RX 5700 XT.Tomake
things weirder,the RDNA has VirtualLink
support built in; AMD has just chosen not to
actually enable it. That at least opens up the
possibility fornew partner card models
adding it, but it’s ashame to miss out if you
buy the reference design, especially as
VirtualLink can act as aversatile USB Type-C
port even if you don’t care forVR.
In any event, the RX 5700 XT finally
delivers something we haven’t really seen
since the GTX 1070: atruly 4K-ready
graphics card forless than £350. The RTX
2060 –which,interestingly,also launched at
£329 –was another 1440p contender that
could handle 4K, but the RX 5700 XT is
significantly more capable of such ahigh
resolution without having to drop quality
settings. We haven’t put the new RTX
Super in our test PC yet, but judging by how
it performs in the PC Specialist Inferno R
(see page 22), AMD’s card will still be alittle
faster while costing £50 less.
SERVED HOT
Thebig catch, it would seem, is the lack of
special features, or at least those on the same
impact level as ray-tracing and DLSS. Radeon
Image Sharpening is generally worth turning
on if you can: it’s afilter that adds amodest
sharpening effect to parts of in-game scenery
that might otherwise look softorblurred.
While the performance cost is negligible,
however,itdoesn’t outright improve
performance as DLSS does, and currently
there’s no support forDirectX 11, making
countless games incompatible.
As we say, however,both DLSS and
ray-tracing have support issues of their own,
so if you’re happyeither to wait or just to
ignore all these bells and whistles entirely,
the RX 5700 XT’s core performance
shouldn’t be any less appealing.
That said, we’re not entirely sold on the
reference design and its blower-style cooler.
It’s noisy,for one thing: we measured it
whirring awayat53dB from adistance of
15cm, almost as loud as if there was aperson
inside speaking to you. Despitethis, it’s not
that great as acooler: idle temperatures sat
at ahigh 60°C, while hanging around 80°C
under load, and peaking at 82°C.
The RTX2070 is alot cooler under
identical conditions, and it’s more frugal
with power,too.When running games, the
RX 5700 XT generally used around 180W,
or just 80% of its 225W TDP,but it
occasionally jumped to 212W,nearly 30W
higher than the RTX2070’s maximum.
AMD’s card also needs both 8-pin and 6-pin
power cables, not just the 8-pin cable.
Luckily,partner cards with custom coolers
are on the way, so with any luck you’ll have a
choice of designs that have all the RX 5700
XT’s cost-efficient performance,but with
quieter,more thermal-efficient fans.
HIPHIP 4K
As much as we like DLSS (ray-tracing still
needs work), we’d happily give it up foradeal
such as this. RDNA maybealess flashy
architecture but it convinces where it matters
most: straight frames-per-second in games.
Even if you have to wait forthe perfect
partner variant instead, it will be worth it.
That said, if you’re going to be playing at
1080p or 1440p,aneven better choice might
be the RX 5700: with the exception of Tomb
Raider,itwas largely fewer than 10fps behind
the RTX5700 XT in our benchmark tests,
while running cooler and using less power.
Crucially,itcosts amere £290, so is an
even bigger bargain, although for4K, the RX
5700 XT has alarge enough lead that the
extra £39 looks like small change.
Either way, these are AMD’s two best
graphics cards in years, and it will be
exciting to see what happens when RDNA
inevitably takes on Nvidia’s topguns, the
RTX2080 and RTX2080 Ti.
JamesArcher
SPECIFICATIONS
DirtShowdown
Metro:LastLight
TombRaider
0% -50 Reference + 50 + 100
Seepage90forperformancedetails
GPUAMDRadeonRX5700XT•MEMORY8GBGDDR6•
GRAPHICSCARDLENGTH272mm•WARRANTYOneyear
RTB•DETAILSwww.amd.com•PARTCODERadeonRX
5700XT
111fps
RDNA maybealess flashyarchitecturebut it convinces
whereitmattersmost: frames-per-second in games
199fps
96fps
