AMD Radeon RX 5700

We found the Radeon RX 5700 GPU to be an impressive OpenCL workhorse which can be useful.AMD offers PCIe Gen4 that NVIDIA cannot match at this time. On the flip side, NVIDIA has better driver support and CUDA support making it able to accelerate a wider...

This is, frankly, at least a year overdue. While Nvidia has been wowing with the real-time Ray Tracing and AI-powered anti-aliasing capabilities of its latest Turing GPUs, AMD has only been able to cough out a couple of underwhelming Vega and Polaris...

The RX 5700 is the lower priced alternative to the 5700 XT. It's as fast as Vega 64 and uses substantially less power, but still lacks DXR...

AMD has introduced some attractive, next-generation GPUs that fill in the gap between the previous-gen Vega 56/65 and Radeon VII quite nicely, while also competing well with NVIDIA’s similarly-priced counterparts in the meatiest part of the enthusiast GPU market. With all of the buzz surrounding the Ryzen 3000 series – which is freakin’ awesome BTW – the prospect of an all-AMD-powered gaming PC system is looking better than it has for over a decade.

The Radeon RX 5700 delivers excellent gaming performance and power efficiency while moving the goal posts forward on several technological fronts.

Doing more with less, the streamlined RDNA architecture delivers a meaningful performance uplift over the disappointing Vega cards of the past generation, and efficiency improvements on the cutting-edge 7nm process help lower power consumption to more agreeable levels. Those are the two things near the top of most users' lists for a 2019 Radeon GPU, and with promising Ryzen 3rd Gen CPUs, a forward-looking X570 chipset and a growing selection of FreeSync monitors, there's now good reason to consider investing heavily in the AMD ecosystem.

The RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT comfortably outperform the existing Vega cards, and the XT model often will give a higher frames-per-second than the Radeon VII, yet at nowhere near the price. Add in the addition of AMDs own Radeon Image Sharpening allowing you to run at lower resolutions than your monitors native one without softening the image quality too much and with a negligible performance impact; improved media rendering for all of you streamers who share your gaming exploits with the world. It makes the Navi a seriously attractive option for anyone.

At $349 and $399 respectively these cards are currently the best value in 1440p gaming. They don’t have raytracing, that’s a draw back, but considering the level of support and performance-cost RT features bring, frankly, I don’t much mind. Much more important is that they deliver better-than-2070 frame rates for less than the cost of a 2070 while at the same time offering image enhancement to give you a better, crisper image. If you’re in the market, my recommendation would be to save up and buy the “XT” but as the results show, even the normal model offers “leadership performance” at this price point.