AMD Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT GPU Reviews - Could Have Been Worse

"It is good to see AMD back on track with some mainstream to high-end positioned Radeons. 7nm, a new architecture, GDDR6 the specs all tick the right boxes. Seen from Polaris AMD made a HUGE step forward in performance. In fact, NAVI sits at the Vega performance level. So the improved architecture is sound, and works. My fear, for now, is that the products might be priced a notch too high even after the pre-launch price drop. Team green just outed their super products, and the RTX 2060, 2070 Super will be fighting off NAVI10. The realm AMD is sitting in performance wise with the RX 5700 series is the non-Super models 2060 and 2070 with exceptions here and there. Then there is, of course, the discussion on how relevant you find hardware accelerated Raytracing and Tensor support. Most of you don't care at this time, but much like anything in the tech industry, everything will evolve, and AMD positioned itself to be smack down in the middle of that next step in the gaming evolution. By not offering at least RT support, their trump card really needs to be pricing and proper shader based gaming performance," we read in the test.

"Across our benchmark suite, Radeon RX 5700 XT averages 9.9%-higher frame rates than the GeForce RTX 2060 Super. Radeon RX 5700 averages 11%-higher frame rates than the GeForce RTX 2060. The GeForce RTX 2070 Super does serve up average frame rates 6.9% higher than Radeon RX 5700 XT, but it costs an extra 25%.

Compared to AMD’s previous generation, Radeon RX 5700 XT achieves 15%-higher average frame rates than Radeon RX Vega 64 at a $100-lower launch price and 76% of the power consumption. And get this—the boutique Radeon VII averages just 3.8%-higher frame rates across our suite and costs 70% more!

Assuming AMD’s lower prices stick, and assuming Nvidia doesn’t clap back, the Navi-based Radeon RX 5700-series cards storm onto the scene with strength that many enthusiasts weren’t expecting," the reviewer concludes.

"The new Radeon RX 5700 XT might not be the best graphics card on the market but it doesn't need to be, it needed to land somewhere better than Vega and somewhere under or equal to SUPER, and it does just that. In some things it loses, in some games it equals, and in some games it beats its competitors (either in itself with Vega, or with NVIDIA and GeForce GTX/RTX series graphics cards).

Wrapping things up, AMD has done a great job here with the Radeon RX 5700 XT. I don't like the RX 5700 as much as I hoped, but the RX 5700 XT is a surprising card that has me wanting to test it much more. Not just in reference form but in custom cards from the likes of MSI and SAPPHIRE... I can't wait to see how far the Navi 10 GPU can be pushed with additional cooling and power limits removed or lifted," the test author is delighted.

Ultimately, today’s launch isn’t a case of a next-generation card coming in and wiping the floor with its last-generation competition; like the RTX 20 series launch last year, the RX 5700 launch is a more gradual shift in pricing and performance. GPU development is expensive, 7nm is even more expensive, and everyone is playing things a lot more conservatively than they did earlier this decade. For the moment then, the RX 5700 series can largely be considered to be part of the same generation of GPUs as the RTX 20/GTX 16 series, for all of the benefits and downsides that entails. The upside is that we get more to talk about, and get to form a more nuanced opinion, but for anyone looking for a simple recommendation for a new video card, there won’t be anything quite that simple with this launch," the author compares.