AMD Radeon RX 5700 review: With 7 nm to success?

AMD is heralding a new era in graphics card architecture with RDNA. The new architecture was developed from the ground up and optimized for performance and energy efficiency. With a structural width of only 7 nm, AMD continues the trend of pioneering technology. This applies to the PCI Express interface too since the 5700 series from AMD features the first GPUs to use PCI Express 4.0, which was an innovation with the introduction of the Ryzen 3000. This doubles the bandwidth so that more data can be transferred.

The Navi 10 graphics chip in the AMD Radeon RX 5700 is a weaker model since the complete version of the Navi 10 is found in the Radeon RX 5700 XT. With 2306 stream processors, the chip offers a bit more than the Nvidia RTX 2060S with the TU106 though. Both graphics cards are similar in terms of clock speeds because the biggest rival to the Radeon RX 5700 is the GeForce RTX 2060S. AMD has never really skimped on VRAM, and so we find 8 GB GDDR6 RAM in the new Navi cards too.

In terms of energy consumption, AMD especially wanted and needed to improve since the somewhat similarly fast AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 doesn't offer a good energy balance with its high TDP of about 300 watts. The panorama is very different if you look at the technical specifications of the RX 5700. With 180 watts, the AMD graphics card ranks on the same level as the competing model from Nvidia. We will discuss later whether this proved to be true in our review.

As can be gathered from the image on the right side, AMD provides three different clock speeds for the Radeon RX 5700. The base frequency of the smaller Navi 10 GPU is 1465 MHz, while the maximum boost frequency is 1725 MHz. AMD also gives the game frequency now, which can be expected when gaming. This is an average value since the full boost isn't reached all the time. In this way, the game frequency for the RX 5700 is 1625 MHz.

Synthetic benchmarks don't reflect the real performance of a graphics card in modern games. The Radeon RX 5700 was almost always able to place itself ahead of the MSI RTX 2060 Gaming Z 6G in our test course. The GeForce RTX 2060S FE from Nvidia is a bit faster, although the RX 5700 is on par in certain games. In the modern title F1 2019, the Navi GPU is slightly faster even. It only remains to be said that both pixel accelerators work almost equally fast. Depending on how games are optimized and how well the manufacturer tuned the drivers, there are slight differences in performance. There isn't a clear winner or loser. However, the support of ray tracing is a plus for Nvidia. At the moment, AMD still can't show anything in this regard.

The frame times for the Radeon RX 5700 are considerably better compared to the RTX 2060S. Although individual drops are documented and graphically visible, they don't have a negative impact on the gaming experience. The frame rates also show a much steadier progress in the test with The Witcher 3 (ultra preset) compared to the GeForce RTX 2060S FE. With an average of 84.2 fps, smooth gaming is guaranteed.