AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT Review: Known issues of the reference design

RDNA is the new architecture that Navi-based GPUs utilize. The Radeon RX 5700 XT is produced using the 7-nm manufacturing process and has 2560 shading units. AMD first used the 7-nm lithography with the Radeon VII. Therefore, AMD is still ahead of the curve when it comes to the implementation of new features. This also applies to the PCI Express 4.0 interface, which offers double the bandwidth of the PCI Express 3.0 interface. However, if you want to be able to take advantage of the PCI Express 4.0 standard, then you will need a motherboard with an X570 chipset, which was released alongside AMD’s processors based on the Zen 2 architecture.

The AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT comes with the highest-specced Navi 10 chip. This means that AMD does not offer any other GPUs that are more powerful than the RX 5700 XT. However, there is a cut-down version with fewer shading units known as the AMD Radeon RX 5700. The highest-specced version of the Navi 10-based GPU comes with as many shading units as the GeForce RTX 2070S FE. Nvidia introduced this GPU shortly before the launch of the RX 5700 XT in order to maintain its performance lead. We will talk about whether or not Nvidia succeeded in this later.

The AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT has a TDP of 225 watts, which is slightly higher than that of the RTX 2070S FE (215 watts). The latest AMD GPUs from the Radeon RX 5700 series still feature a radial cooling fan, which blows the hot air away from the GPU. A vapor chamber is located right above the GPU die to facilitate the removal of excess heat. 

AMD says the Radeon RX 5700 XT is a GPU built for 1440p gaming. Our gaming benchmarks confirm this. While the RX 5700 XT can achieve playable frame rates at 1440p, it struggles to keep its head above water at 2160p. However, there are a few titles that are playable in UHD on medium to high settings.

The competing GPUs from Team Green put up quite a fight against the RX 5700 XT. Even the factory-overclocked RTX 2070 from MSI is able to beat the Navi-based graphics card in certain titles. An RTX 2070 Founders Edition would probably be just a bit slower than the Radeon RX 5700 XT. The GeForce RTX 2070S FE is generally faster than the Navi-based GPU. However, there are titles in which both graphics cards achieve a very similar level of performance.

Just like its smaller variant (AMD Radeon RX 5700), the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT can run the vast majority of games in QHD on ultra settings. It cannot handle higher resolutions, though. However, the RTX 2070S FE meets the same fate when gaming at 2160p, because Nvidia’s GPU is also only suitable for 1440p gaming.

We use The Witcher 3 to examine how well the graphics card performs under load. We run the game on ultra settings and record both the frame rate and the frame time. Here, the RX 5700 XT performs better than the RTX 2070S. There are fewer spikes in the frame-time graph, and the spikes that we did measure should not be noticeable during actual gameplay. The same applies to the frame rate. Even though we did observe a slight drop in the frame rate due to thermal issues, 92 FPS is still way more than enough for the game to feel very smooth.