AMD Radeon RX 5700
We’re all surprised, as Jarred Walton has found a GPU that makes him happy.
Stop all your Navel gazing, we told Jarred Walton. He said it’s pronounced Navi, and it’s the new AMD GPU architecture that’s about as good value as you’re going to get.
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. The RX 5700 uses the same Navi 10 GPU as the other 5700 models, but AMD disables four Compute Units 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.
Overall, pretty much regardless of what setting you choose, the Radeon RX 5700 comes out ahead of the slightly more expensive RTX 2060. It’s five per cent faster at 1080p medium, eight per cent faster at 1080p ultra, 11 per cent faster at 1440p ultra, and 15 per cent faster at 4K ultra – not that we’d recommend trying to play games at 4K ultra on this card.
Those claims AMD made about improving performance-per-watt by 50 per cent or more? They’re true, based on our testing. About the only minor ding is that noise levels appear to be slightly higher than with 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 5700 tends to beat Vega 64 in most games. The fact that it can do so while using half the 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.
When it comes to raytracing, Vulkan-rt and Windows DXR are now standards but are not supported by Navi 10. Support could be added later via Compute shaders, but AMD is sitting on the fence. Then again, the handful of games that support raytracing don’t support Linux so the point is a mute one.
We’ve held off on this review as AMDGPU driver support for this new architecture, while in place on the day of release in July 2019, had remained in a state of development – there was no Vulkan (RADV) driver but support for Opengl (Mesa 14.2). By early August Vulkan was supported and Opengl performance was good. Full AMDGPU support is expected in Linux kernel 5.3 in time for Ubuntu 19.10 and Fedora 31, ideal for sensible people who don’t want to build their own drivers from source.
Overall, the Radeon RX 5700 is a great card and belongs on the list of potential GPU upgrades. If you’re looking for the best £340 graphics card today, it’s the RX 5700, even if it might not be the better card six months or two years from now. Perhaps most importantly, there’s more competition now, and that’s resulting in better value for everyone.