Tech preview: Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT - NAVI Unveiled

AMD Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT

AMD just announced its Radeon 5700 series graphics cards. The NAVI based products are fabbed at 7nm, get GDDR6 memory and is based on a new architecture called rDNA (with that R for Radeon. In this early preview article, we’ll share initial details, technology info, and specifications. This by no means is a review, the actual launch you may expect in early July.

It has been a long wait ever since AMD started talking about what is fabbed at 7nm and developed under codename NAVI, and starting today it is released as the Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards. Announced and named are two Radeon RX 5700 series products based on a NAVI1- GPU. At Computex actually already a demo has been shown, in thatvthat demo a 5700 XT was compared against a GeForce RTX 2070 in direct 1:1 gameplay, the title was Strange Brigade. The FPS looked about the same. And from that moment on AMD announced that NAVI based product(s) would be launched in July. Today June 10th there was a live stream with all details on products, specs, and prices announced.

AMD wants to tackle two price points for NAVI, for the familiar frame of mind let's call them Radeon RX 5700 PRO and of course the Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU versions. The top model NAVI will be competing with and should be stronger than, a GeForce RTX 2070. That means that this new generation of cards also sits dead on top of the Vega lineup, which will slowly be phased out.  

As we all know NAVI is the new family of Radeon GPUs. NAVI is based on what AMD refers to as 7nm RDNA architecture (Radeon DNA). NAVI will be the first commercial consumer graphics card that is PCIe Express 4.0 compatible, is has a new compute design, new cache-hierarchy and will be reducing latency whilst offering lower power. AMD claimed a 1.25x perf per clock improvement and would offer 1.5x better power consumption.

NAVI 10 GPU