Welcome 7nm, AMD NAVI is here! – AMD Radeon RX 5700XT and RX 5700 Graphics Card Review

Navi is here!

We could not be more excited to see a competitive GPU with the RX 5700 Series on the market from Radeon or Radeon Technologies Group (commonly summarized as RTG) which is the managing branch within AMD for display/Graphics. I know that to many of you, AMD and RTG/Radeon are common names but since we have not seen an AMD GPU in quite some time, I feel it is necessary to explain where we are starting at today.

Radeon has had quite the troubled road and that’s not to say only Radeon as AMD has had quite the checkered past in being competitive. AMD struggled for over a decade to be a major player in the market in the eyes of consumers. AMD was seen as the cheap or poor man’s option of products. Many saw them for the value they are/were but many enthusiasts users simply would not even consider recommending an AMD product, and this is not just about the hardware side but even supporting software stack issues. Things such as Catalyst software which was a hot mess on many occasions.

Now lets fast forward, I guess it would be damn near a decade at this point. just a mere few years ago AMD re-entered the market with new ZEN CPU core. With that AMD started their embrace of the enthusiasts market and they made key improvements to their GCN GPU architecture along the way, but all roads led to where we are at now which is feature performance and architectural optimizations which would bring us to now 7nm and some new hardware that is truly exciting and has much of the industry and community buzzing.

What we are looking at today is the graphics end of this launch in the new RDNA powered NAVI 7nm GPUs. The Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT. These GPUs have ALOT of ground to makeup and a very cynical community that has grown used to the hype train running away from AMD and building unrealistic expectations only to be let down with the product that comes to market from the GPU side. AMD has done ALOT to make this less of an issue including being very transparent about their new graphics products and their expected performance level and price point. So transparent almost to their own demise as when they released this information during the announcement they gave plenty of time for Nvidia to respond and even undercut AMD with the new RTX SUPER series of cards which were at competitive price points and targeted to disrupt the AMD launch of these very cards.

AMD has responded and just a mere forty six hours before the launch I was advised that the pricing for the RX 5700 series were being adjusted. This means that the RX 5700XT which was announced at $449 now moves to $399 while the RX 5700 drops from $379 to $349. This is a decent drop and gives back some perf/dollar in favor of RTG. So now let’s get into this and see what the new Radeon RX 5700 series is all about.

The initial Radeon RX 5700 Series GPUs come to market as follows.

• Radeon RX 5700 XT $399 (Source: AMD)
• Radeon RX 5700 $349 (Source: AMD)

This price reflects the 11th-hour changes we mentioned above and places them in direct competition once again with the targeted products, the RTX 2070 and the RTX 2060 leaving the SUPER series of cards in a spot of their own creation. This, of course, will lead to further back and forth as both sides will now be fighting against the middle for market share.

Let’s read on and see what the new RDNA powered NAVI cards are packing.