GPU Navi 10
Lithography 7nm
Transistor Count 10.3 billion
Stream processors 2,304
Texture Units 144
ROPs 64
Core/Boost Clock 1,465/1,725MHz
Memory Capacity
& Type
8GB GDDR6
Memory Speed 14GT/s
Memory Bus 256-bit
TDP 180W
Display Connectors 3x DisplayPort 1.4,
1x HDMI 2.0BAMD Radeon RX 5700
A good alternative that isn’t quite as beefy or
handsome as the 5700 XT, for a lower price
AMD Radeon RX 5700 Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060
Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 (Avg fps) 88 / 59 83/55
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (Avg fps) 58/45 62 / 48
Far Cry 5 (Avg fps) 121 / 93 109/78
Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Avg fps) 111 / 89 100/72
Middle Earth: Shadow of War (Avg fps) 97 / 60 88/57
Metro Exodus (Avg fps) 73 / 58 65/48
Total War: Warhammer II (Avg fps) 80/59 92 / 68GPU BENCHMARKSBest scores are in bold. Our test bed consists of an Intel Core i7-8700K, 16GB of G.Skill DDR4-3200, a Gigabyte
Z370 Aorus Gaming 7, and a 1TB Samsung Evo M.2 SSD. All games are tested at their highest graphical profile
with AA turned on, at 1080p and 1440p respectively.THE RADEON RX 5700 is the second of
AMD’s new Navi 10 graphics cards,
sporting the new and improved RDNA
architecture, and playing second fiddle to
the RX 5700 XT’s leading role. It’s a story
we’ve seen many times—the RX 570 was
a modest step down from the RX 580,
same for Vega 56 compared to Vega 64. If
you prefer the Nvidia side of things, it’s a
bit like the GTX 1660 versus the GTX 1660
Ti. Sporting a last-minute price drop, the
direct competition is the RTX 2060.
The RX 5700 uses the same Navi 10
GPU as the other 5700 models, but AMD
disables four CUs and 256 cores, as well
as dropping the boost clock by 180MHz.
That’s typical for the second-tier product
for any GPU, and the reason comes down
to chip yields. RX 5700 cards likely won’t
hit the same clock speeds as the 5700 XT,
no matter how hard you try to overclock.
At present, AMD has no support for
DirectX Raytracing or Vulkan-RT. It’s
possible to do ray tracing via compute
shaders, and Nvidia has released drivers
that do exactly that for the GTX 10/16
series GPUs, but AMD is so far sitting
out on ray-tracing support. Perhaps that
won’t matter during the life of the cards—
the RTX 2060 already struggles with even
modest ray-tracing effects—but with the
next-gen AMD-powered consoles adding
ray-tracing hardware support, there is
the potential to be left behind.
Overall, pretty much regardless of
what setting you choose, the Radeon RX5700 comes out ahead of the equivalently
priced RTX 2060. It’s 5 percent faster at
1080p medium, 8 percent faster at 1080p
ultra, 11 percent faster at 1440p ultra,
and 15 percent faster at 4K ultra—not
that we’d necessarily recommend trying
to play games at 4K ultra on the card.
Those claims AMD made about
improving performance-per-watt by 50
percent or more? They’re true, based on
our testing. About the only minor ding
(other than the lack of DXR-enabled
drivers) is that noise levels appear to be
slightly higher than Nvidia’s cards.POWER PLAY
If you’re rooting for AMD or just sick of
Nvidia’s stranglehold on the GPU market,
the new AMD Navi graphics cards are a
great addition. Performance and even
price aren’t a massive improvement over
the Vega cards, but even the slower RX
5 7 0 0 ten d s to b e at Ve g a 6 4 in m o s t g ame s.
The fact that it can do so while using a
bit more than half as much power is the
bigger deal in our book. All things being
equal, we’d much rather have a quieter
and less power-hungry GPU, and the
RX 5700 fits that description. In fact, it’s
about on par with the RTX 2060 in power
use, while providing more performance,
and it uses 10–15W less than the 2060
Super. Less power means less noise, less
heat, and potentially a smaller PSU.
There’s also the question of API
support. Whether you like it or not,DirectX Raytracing is now a Microsoft
standard. That means more ray-tracing
games are on the way, and even AMD
has plans to support DXR via hardware
acceleration—just not right now. If DXR
catches on, and optimizations to improve
performance without compromising
image quality continue, in a year or
two, the Navi 10 GPUs could look like a
questionable purchase.
Overall, the Radeon RX 5700 is still
a great card and belongs on the list of
potential GPU upgrades. If you’re looking
for the best $350 graphics card today, it’s
the RX 5700, even if it might not be the
better card six months or two years from
now. There’s also hope that street prices
will drop a bit after the initial rush is over.
Perhaps most importantly, regardless of
whether you want to buy an AMD or Nvidia
graphics card, there’s more competition
now, and that’s resulting in better value
for everyone. –JARRED WALTON8
VERDICT AMD Radeon RX 5700RAD Efficient and fast; beats
Vega 64 and RTX 2060.
SAD No ray-tracing support; louder than
RTX cards.
$350, http://www.amd.comSPECIFICATIONSmaximumpc.com OCT 2019 MAXIMUMPC 81