What just happened? AMD has officially unveiled their "ultimate 1080p gaming" graphics card, the Radeon RX 5600 XT. The GPU packs 2304 cores and operates with a game clock of 1375 MHz and a boost clock of 1560 MHz. It's priced competitively at $279 and will be released on January 21.

The Radeon RX 5600 XT is a direct challenger to Nvidia's GTX 1660 Ti, which has 1536 cores shifting between a 1500 MHz base and 1770 MHz boost clock at the same MSRP. The two cards have an identical memory configuration. While the 1660 Ti has a definite edge in clock speeds, AMD reckons their core count advantage more than makes up for it.

On stage, AMD showed benchmarks from six games where the 5600 XT beat the 1660 Ti. Margins ranged from about 5% to 30%, with an average of 16%.

Performance in Frames Per Second
(AMD benchmark data)
Game Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 88 92
The Division 2 74 88
Gears of War 5 69 87
Apex Legends 118 124
Fortnite 111 126
World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth 113 147

Not much of that should surprise you, if you've been following the leaks. But what might is this: while AMD didn't mention it during their presentation, they've published a product page for the RX 5600 non-XT variant as well. It has the same speeds and memory as the 5600 XT but has its core count brought down to 2048 shaders.

Like the non-XT 5500, the 5600 is for OEM systems only, which is reasonable given there's not much room between the 5600 XT and 5500 XT. The specs place it roughly equivalent to the Nvidia GTX 1660 Super. We've asked AMD when it will become available, but we expect it to start appearing in pre-built systems when the 5600 XT launches later this month.

On the table below you can check out the specs for the entire first generation of desktop Navi. We don't have base clocks for the RX 5600-series as AMD has yet to confirm them, but we've heard it's around 1130 MHz.

Model Cores Base Clock Game Clock Boost Clock TFLOPs Memory Bandwidth MSRP
RX 5700 XT 2560 1605 MHz 1755 MHz 1905 MHz 8.99 8GB 448 GB/s $399
RX 5700 2304 1465 MHz 1625 MHz 1725 MHz 7.49 8GB 448 GB/s $349
RX 5600 XT 2304 ? 1375 MHz 1560 MHz 6.34 6GB 288 GB/s $279
RX 5600 2048 ? 1375 MHz 1560 MHz 5.63 6GB 288 GB/s ?
RX 5500 XT 1408 1607 MHz 1717 MHz 1845 MHz 4.84 4GB or 8GB 224 GB/s $169

AMD hasn't shown us a reference edition for the 5600 XT, so for for now we're looking at OEMs. There haven't been any announcements but models from Asrock, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, Sapphire and XFX did briefly appear in AMD's presentation, and there have been a few leaks. There'll be triple and double fan configurations to tackle the 5600 XT's 150W TDP.

Stay tuned for announcements of specific models, and of course, our own benchmark tests come January 21.