Graphics card wars
AMD’s 5700/XT vs Nvidia’s new Super series mid-range cards do battle.
If you’ve been reading our recent issues, you would surely have seen that AMD stole most of the headlines from Computex onwards. Ryzen CPUs! Navi graphics cards! Hold up though. Nvidia has something to say about the latter. Nvidia’s mid-life refresh of its RTX 2000 series has arrived in a timely fashion. The RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super are ready to take the fight to AMD’s long talked about RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT. Let the latest battle in the GPU wars commence.
MARKET POSITIONING
Nvidia’s Turing GPUs are a well known quantity having been on shelf for some time. The Super cards don’t introduce anything as far as new technology is concerned. You still get the key Nvidia features. Ray-tracing support, DLSS and things like Nvidia’s outstanding power efficiency all carry over. If we’re to sum up the Super cards quickly you can think of the 2060 Super as essentially replacing the 2070, while the 2070 Super is a 2080 that’s just a little slower. The Super series is all about adjusting the price/performance ratio of the mid-tier RTX cards, and combatting the new threat from AMD’s RX 5700 series. Additionally, the RTX 2080 also gets the Super treatment, though we’ll be covering that separately in our next issue.
In contrast, AMD’s RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT Navi GPUs are very much new and undoubtedly AMD’s most anticipated 2019 GPUs. It brings key new technologies including a new architecture called RDNA, 7nm process technology and PCIe 4.0 support. The 5700 series are the products AMD will use to bring it to competitiveness in the all-important mid-range market.
VALUE AND PRICING
We got a wealth of information about Navi at AMD’s press conference at Computex, including pricing. Did AMD play its hand too early and give Nvidia time to respond? Is the Super series a reactionary release? Of course you can’t just whip up new GPUs in a few weeks, so obviously Nvidia has been planning for this for many months. The Super launch did create an unusual situation where AMD adjusted its pricing publicly before the 5700 even launched. Even then though, we’re concerned that mid-range pricing continues to creep higher. The cheapest of these cards is $549. It’s just too high for too many gamers.
Looking at the GPUs themselves, in some ways these cards shouldn’t even be competing with each other on price. At 251mm2 the 5700 die size should theoretically give AMD a competitive yield advantage over the 2060 at 445mm2 not to mention the 2070 at 545mm2. It will be interesting to see how the market and pricing matures. With those die sizes, along with AMD’s process advantage, you would think the 5700 would have a lead in power efficiency, but sadly this isn’t the case as AMD has clearly used its power budget to push clock speeds in order to extract maximum performance. It’s going to be interesting to see how AMD develops RDNA given one of its design goals is power efficiency.
To quote Gandalf: ‘The board is set, the pieces are moving. We come to it at last.” It’s time to see just how these cards stack up against one another in the battle to wins the hearts, minds and dollars of gamers.