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AMD reveals Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT

AMD unveils its rivals to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card, the Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT, built on the company's new RDNA architecture.

Radeon graphics card on white background

AMD has unveiled details of its new Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT GPUs at the E3 tradeshow in Los Angeles. The two mid-range cards essentially use the same Navi GPU, which is based on AMD’s RDNA architecture – the company’s first new GPU architecture since Graphics Core Next was introduced in 2012. However, the RX 5700 has a few parts disabled, so it has fewer stream processors and compute units.

The Radeon RX 5700 XT has the full count of 40 compute units, giving it 2,560 stream processors, while the RX 5700 has 36 units, making for 2,304 stream processors. Meanwhile, the clock speeds run to boosted maximums of 1905MHz on the RX 5700XT and 1725MHz on the RX 5700.

The RX 5700-series GPUs are also notable for being built on a 7nm manufacturing process, and being the first gaming GPUs to support PCI-E 4, with support coming from AMD’s forthcoming X570 chipset. Both the 5700 and 5700 XT employ 8GB of GDDR6 memory, which is a change from the HBM2 used in AMD’s high-end GPUs, and the GDDR5 used on its previous mid-range cards.

According to AMD, the RDNA architecture offers 1.25x the performance per clock of Graphics Core Next, and 1.5x the performance per Watt. However, there’s been no mention of support for real-time ray tracing, which could put the new chips at a disadvantage compared with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2070.

No UK pricing has been announced yet, but US pricing sits at $379 (around £350 inc VAT) for the RX 5700, and $449 (around £416 inc VAT) for the RX 5700 XT. Comparatively, the cheapest RTX 2070 cards currently go for around £470 inc VAT. The new GPUs are due to be available on 7 July.