AMD on Monday released its long-awaited Navi GPUs, which it claims are the best 1440p GPUs in their classâand the most affordable, too.Â
The Radeon RX 5700 XT will feature 40 compute units with 2,560 stream processors, and mount 8GB of GDDR6 memory using a 256-bit memory bus. That gives the 5700 XT memory bandwidth in the neighborhood of 448GBps. AMD said the 5700 XT features 9.75 TFLOPS of compute performance. The 5700XT has a board power rating of 225 TDP and is powered by a 6-pin GPU and 8-pin GPU plug. More importantly, the Radeon RX 5700 XT will sell for an affordable $449.
AMDâs 2nd Navi-based GPU is the Radeon RX 5700. It features 36 compute units, 2,304 stream processors, and will have 8GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus for 448Gps. Its compute performance is rated at 7.95 TFLOPs. The Radeon RX 5700 will go for $379.Â
Both GPUs are expected to go on sale, along with AMDâs new Ryzen 3000 chips, on July 7.
If youâre wondering what the clock speeds are, take a seat first.
The Radeon RX 5700 XT features a boost clock of 1,905MHz, a new âgame clockâ of 1,755MHz, and a base clock of 1,605MHz.
The Radeon RX RX 5700 has a boost clock of 1,725MHz, âgame clockâ of 1,625MHz, and a base clock of 1,475MHz.
Whatâs game clock?
The obvious stand-out spec is âgame clock.â For that AMD said it is targeting âgame clockâ based on a list of popular games to maintain the clock speeds. Boost clock would be opportunistically hit based on the load the GPU is running at. When asked if this was just a cynical way to say âthermal throttle,â AMD responded that itâs more about targeting clock speeds that benefit games. In practical performance, most games will hang around at the game clock and only occasionally hit the boost clock. The base clock speed is unlikely to be triggered unless youâre running an extreme stress test.
In the end, the only thing that matters is performance in games. AMD claims both cards can hold up against their Nvidia counterparts.
AMD showed a list of 10 games where the Radeon RX 5700 XT is on parity with, or outperforms, Nvidiaâs GeForce RTX 2070 card. The games ran the gauntlet from Assasinâs Creed Odyssey to Battlefield 5, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, Far Cry New Dawn and Tom Clancyâs Ghost Recon Wildlands.
Likewise, the Radeon RX 5700 also matches up nicely against the GeForce RTX 2060, the company said. AMD again cited a lengthy list of game benchmarks to show it exceeding or matching the GeForce card.
With ray tracing available on GeForce RTX, gamers have been wondering what AMDâs plans are for the technology. AMD officially said the path they see includes using the current GCN and RDNA cards to perform ray tracing using the cardâs shader cores. When Next Gen RDNA (the companyâs official name for its new graphics architecture) comes along, âselect lighting effects for real time gamingâ will be used.
To us, that sounds like a future RDNA will accelerate certain DXR techniques for lighting, similar to the way Nvidiaâs GeForce RTX mixes conventional rasterized rendering and ray tracing.
Beyond that, AMD doesnât seem to think full scene ray tracing can be done on a PC. Instead, the company said full scene ray tracing will likely be done in the cloud--which, well, sounds like streamed gaming.
For the physical cards themselves, AMD said it's heard the longstanding complaints with the companyâs reference blower-style cards, and it designed the new Radeons to be quieter. The 7nm process the GPUâs built on probably helps, too. AMD said it opted for a blower-style design because it believes most PC gamers have decently cooled PCs to begin with
Besides the new hardware, AMD also rolled out a spate of new visual quality tricks. Radeon Image Sharpening (RIS), for instance, performs real-time sharpening. It applies the sharpening only to areas of low contrast that can show improvement from RIS.
AMD Anti-Lag
While AMD showed many new software tricks, its Anti-Lag might have been the niftiest. The technology promises to reduce input lag by up to 30 percent in some games.
AMD officials said lag can often occur in situations where the CPU is waiting for the GPU to finish drawing frames. With Anti-Lag, AMD said itâs figured out a way to tell the CPU to take a pause and essentially wait for the GPU to catch up.
Gloss