AMD launches Navi under the name of Radeon RX 5700 XT at $ 449

AMD spoke at E3 to announce his GPU family "Navi". The company's new graphics cards are officially AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT and Radeon RX 5700 cards. The 5700 series will be launched on July 7, which will allow GPUs to double the AMD processors in the Ryzen 3000 series.

AMD is not tackling the flagship GPU market with the 5700 series. Instead, the company is targeting more traditional prices with standard performance: the 5700XT costs $ 449, while the 5700 costs $ 379. AMD positions the cards against Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2070 ($ 499) and 2060 ($ 349) cards, respectively, and claims performance gains in each comparison.

The cards feature AMD's new "RDNA" architecture, which, according to AMD, offers 1.25 times the performance per clock and 1.5 times the performance per watt compared to the previous generation. The chips are built on TSMC's 7 nm manufacturing process, a significant reduction in the 12 nm process used on the Nvidia Radeon RX 590 and GeForce RTX 2080. The Navi chip is significantly smaller than the previous generation Vega design, with a mere 251mm² compared to 495 mm² die area for Vega. The smallest die should make the Navi much cheaper to produce than Vega.

For specifications, the high-end Radeon RX 5700 XT has 40 compute units for a total of 2560 stream processors. AMD gives three digits for the clock frequency on the XT: a "Base" clock at 1605 MHz, a "Game" clock at 1755 MHz and a "boosted" clock at 1905 MHz. As usual, the cheaper 5700 disables the calculating units and reduces the clock frequency. You have 36 calculation units for a total flow processor of 2304, a base clock of 1465 MHz, a game clock of 1625 MHz and an amplified clock of 1725 MHz.

If any of these clock frequencies is too cautious for you, AMD promises that the 5700 XT is "ready for overclocking" thanks to a sufficiently spacious power supply solution. Both AMD reference models feature 8 GB of GDDR6 memory.

For cooling, the AMD reference design is a fan-type card with aluminum fairing and back plate. A steam chamber draws heat into the heat sink and everything is projected to the back of the card. Cooling fan designs have the disadvantage of generating a lot of noise, but AMD promises a "quiet" card with an "acoustically adjustable" design. If you are not satisfied with the cooler design, the cards produced by a partner with alternative cooling solutions should eventually be available. The cards both have an 8-pin + 6-pin power connection, AMD providing card power values ​​of 225W for the XT and 180W for the least expensive card.

If you receive the full AMD package in July (that is, a Ryzen 3000 processor, an X570 motherboard, and a Radeon 5700 card), you will be fully operational with the new PCI bus standard Express 4.0. This faster interconnection will be ideal for next-generation SSDs and 200 Gbps (!) Ethernet controllers. But for video cards, we have not yet seen a convincing case of use. Still, it offers room for upgrades!

It's good to know all these specifications, but they do not tell us anything about actual performance. As always, it is best to wait for independent performance tests. If you're looking for a graphics processor, it's probably best to see if Nvidia reacts or not.

And speaking of the response of Nvidia, the company teases a product "Super" GeForce for a few weeks now. According to some rumors, the "Super" cards would be corrected editions of existing Nvidia cards and price declines for some non-super cards, which would make the company more competitive with the newly announced AMD lineup. Once again, however, the landmarks will tell the true story. AMD has not responded to this generation with real-time ray tracing technology introduced by Nvidia with the RTX 2080 Ti. But given the tremendous performance performance that ray tracing even causes for Nvidia's fastest cards (and limited game support for ray tracing), this is not a huge loss for AMD.

Regardless of what happens between AMD and Nvidia in the PC graphics card war, AMD GPUs promise to be almost everywhere else in the future. At the beginning of the presentation, AMD discussed its design successes, noting that AMD provides graphics chips to the next-generation Xbox and Playstation consoles, Apple's Mac Pro, and Apple's streaming platform. Stadia games from Google. AMD has also recently signed an RDNA license agreement with Samsung, which will incorporate graphics technology into its SoC Exynos for smartphones and tablets.