AMD Announces Radeon RX 5700 XT & RX 5700: The Next Gen of AMD Video Cards Starts on

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As part of a jam-packed day of AMD product news, moments ago AMD’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su got off the stage, wrapping up her suite of announcements. The highlight of which is AMD’s new family of video cards, the Radeon RX 5700 series. AMD first teased these back at the tail-end of Computex a few weeks ago, and while the cards won’t actually launch until July, AMD has opened the floodgates on information about these cards – pricing, expected performance, architecture – so let’s get to it.

The Radeon RX 5700 series – which I’ll call the 5700 series for short – are AMD’s new family of mid-to-high end video cards. Within AMD’s product stack these cards essentially replace AMD’s previous RX Vega 64/56 parts, offering similar-to-better performance at lower prices, lower power consumption, and with newer features. To be clear, these are not flagship-level video cards, and at some point in time Vega 64/56 will get true successors in the form of faster, more powerful high-end video cards. But within AMD’s product stack and in the broader market, this is where the new cards will land.

These new cards from AMD are part of their first wave of cards based on their new RNDA architecture family. We’ll get into (excruciating) detail about that at a later time, but at a high level RDNA makes some pretty radical shifts in how AMD’s underlying GPU architecture works, more than earning the new name and realigning our performance expectations for AMD video cards. RDNA ultimately seeks to boost both AMD’s workload efficiency – that is, getting more work done with the same resources – as well as their power efficiency, in order to improve their competitiveness in the PC video card market. Pioneered in the Navi family of GPUs, the RDNA architecture will be the basis of AMD products for a long time to come; and not just PC GPUs, but consoles (Xbox and Playstation), mobile, and whatever other deals AMD can land.

But getting back to the matter at hand, AMD is launching two 5700 series cards here next month. At the high end we have the fully enabled Radeon RX 5700 XT (yes, those insufferable suffixes are back), which sports 40 CUs and a peak clockspeed of over 1900MHz. It’s partner in crime will be the suffix-free Radeon RX 5700, which is the traditional second-tier part that cuts back on some functional units and performance in the name of offering a lower-priced card (and letting AMD salvage Navi chips). These parts, AMD tells us, will be competitive with the GeForce RTX 2070 and RTX 2060 respectively, though of course this is something we will determine for ourselves once we have them in for testing.

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