In a bid to bolster competitiveness of the $379 Radeon RX 5700 (non-XT) against its rival from the NVIDIA camp, the GeForce RTX 2060, AMD is leaving the memory configuration completely unchanged from the faster $449 Radeon RX 5700 XT. The RX 5700 will get 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus, with the same 14 Gbps memory speed as the RX 5700 XT. This works out to a memory bandwidth of 448 GB/s. In comparison, the $349 (launch price) RTX 2060 only has 6 GB of memory, across a 192-bit wide memory bus. With a memory speed of 14 Gbps, this setup achieves 336 GB/s.

The other area where AMD is reinforcing the RX 5700 is its raster muscle. The RX 5700 has the same 64 ROPs as the RX 5700 XT. AMD carved this SKU out by disabling two workgroup processors (four RDNA compute units), reducing the stream processor count to 2,304. This also turns down the TMU count from 160 to 144. The GPU engine clock speeds are also reduced, with 1465 MHz base, 1625 MHz "gaming clocks," and 1725 MHz boost clocks; compared to 1605/1755/1905 MHz of the RX 5700 XT. The RX 5700 has a typical board power of 180W compared to the 224W of the RX 5700 XT. Custom design cards may even feature just one 8-pin PCIe power input, while some of the premium factory-overclocked designs could use 8-pin + 6-pin configurations.

Two of the often overlooked components of a new graphics architecture are the I/O and multimedia capabilities. With its Radeon RX 5700-series "Navi 10" graphics processor, AMD gave the two their first major update in over two years, with the new Radeon Display Engine, and Radeon Multimedia Engine. The Display Engine is a hardware component that handles the graphics card's physical display I/O. The Radeon Multimedia Engine is a set of fixed-function hardware that provides CODEC-specific acceleration to offload your CPU.

The Navi Radeon Display Engine features an updated DisplayPort 1.4 HDR implementation that's capable of handling 8K displays at 60 Hz with a single cable. It can also handle 4K UHD at 240 Hz with a single cable. These also include HDR and 10-bit color. It achieves this by implementing DSC 1.2a (Display Stream Compression). The display controller also supports 30 bpp internal color-depth. The HDMI implementation remains HDMI 2.0. The multi-plane overlay protocol (MPO) implementation now supports a low-power mode. This should, in theory, reduce the GPU's power draw when idling or playing back video.

AMD "Navi 10" is a very different GPU from the "Vega 10," or indeed the "Polaris 10." The GPU sees the introduction of the new RDNA graphics architecture, which is the first big graphics architecture change on an AMD GPU in nearly a decade. AMD had in 2011 released its Graphics CoreNext (GCN) architecture, and successive generations of GPUs since then, brought generational improvements to GCN, all the way up to "Vega." At the heart of RDNA is its brand new Compute Unit (CU), which AMD redesigned to increase IPC, or single-thread performance.

Before diving deeper, it's important to confirm two key specifications of the "Navi 10" GPU. The ROP count of the silicon is 64, double that of the "Polaris 10" silicon, and same as "Vega 10." The silicon has sixteen render-backends (RBs), these are quad-pumped, which work out to an ROP count of 64. AMD also confirmed that the chip has 160 TMUs. These TMUs are redesigned to feature 64-bit bi-linear filtering. The Radeon RX 5700 XT maxes out the silicon, while the RX 5700 disables four RDNA CUs, working out to 144 TMUs. The ROP count on the RX 5700 is unchanged at 64.

Here are some of the first clear pictures of the Radeon RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 AMD launched on Monday. The two cards are based on the new 7 nm "Navi 10" silicon that implements AMD's latest RDNA architecture. The reference-design RX 5700 XT sports a brand new premium design with a ridged metal cooler shroud studded with an illuminated Radeon logo on top, a second logo at its front face, and a matching back-plate. Underneath is an aluminium fin-channel heatsink with a vapor-chamber base-plate that pulls heat from the GPU, memory, and VRM. A lateral-flow blower ventilates the heatsink, pushing hot air out of the case. Power is drawn from a combination of 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors. Outputs include three DisplayPort and one HDMI.

The Radeon RX 5700 looks a little less premium, and its cooler design greatly resembles the "metal" reference cooler of the RX Vega 64. This is possibly because reference RX 5700 will not make it to the market unlike reference RX 5700 XT, and will instead be an AIB partner-driven launch, with all cards being custom-design. AMD also provided images of the RX 5700 XT in a "teardown" shot, which reveals the vapor-chamber based heatsink, the lateral blower, and more importantly, the reference-design PCB with its 7-phase VRM.More pictures follow.

It's been a very busy May-June for AMD as the company pushes out its major client-segment product lines spread across Computex 2019, and E3 2019. At Computex, the company focused on its 3rd generation Ryzen "Zen 2" desktop processors, and led its partners to show us a galaxy of new motherboards based on the AMD X570 chipset. It turns out that the company was saving a handful processor SKUs focused on gamers for E3.

The second important product launch of course is Radeon RX 5700 series, based on AMD's new "Navi 10" silicon on which its new RDNA graphics architecture debuts. With its AIB (add-in board) partners expected to be allowed to make custom-design cards, and based on what little nuggets of information AMD put out, "Navi" promises to stir up a key performance-segment price-band that's currently held by NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2070 and RTX 2060. The AMD keynote will see the company CEO Dr. Lisa Su and her top execs take centerstage to make some big announcements. With E3 being a purely entertainment / client-segment forum, the AMD keynote promises not bore with tiresome topics such as AI, self-driving cars, etc.2:30 PM PDT: Ahead of its keynote, AMD posted a teaser video of its new RDNA graphics architecture on YouTube.

The 9.75 TFLOPs figure in the leaked specifications slide of the Radeon RX 5700 XT "Navi" graphics card from earlier today got many guessing if AMD is essentially putting RX Vega-level performance into a GPU that sips a fraction of its power. It turns out that AMD's claim of the RX 5700 XT being faster than the GeForce RTX 2070 wasn't just specific to the odd super-optimized game title, but a whole selection of games, many of which some with GameWorks varnish, some of which even support NVIDIA RTX.

AMD's [leaked] performance slide for the Radeon RX 5700 XT sees the card beat the RTX 2070 in "Assassin's Creed: Odyssey," "Battlefield V," "CoD: Black Ops 4," "Far Cry: New Dawn," "Metro Exodus," Tom Clancy's "The Division 2," "The Witcher 3," and Tom Clancy's "Ghost Recon: Wildlands." The card is also striking distance behind the RTX 2070 at "Shadow of the Tomb Raider," and Sid Meier's "Civilisation 6." All games in this slide are tested at 1440p resolution, with in-game settings maxed out (although we're waiting to read the Endnotes on whether "max out" in NVIDIA's context means turning on RTX on some of these games). The RX 5070 XT beats the RTX 2070 by as much as 22 percent in "Battlefield V," and 15 percent in "Metro Exodus," and is claimed to be within single-digit percentage ahead of the RTX 2070. There's another picture of the RX 5070 XT reference board in this slide, and unless we're mistaken, we spy two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. We'll learn more about this card in a few hours from now.

Ahead of its official reveal at AMD's E3 2019 keynote scheduled for 3 PM (Pacific) later today, VideoCardz scored a key slide that spills the beans on AMD's next performance-segment graphics card, the Radeon RX 5700 XT. This card is based on the 7 nm "Navi 10" silicon, and is its "XT" (maxed-out) SKU. Its reference-design board design in the slide reveals a return to a lateral-blower type cooling solution that now has a prettier cooler shroud with silver ridges and Radeon logos on two sides, one of which is illuminated, with a possible RGB LED accent that runs along the top of the card.

The specifications revealed point to 40 compute units. Unless AMD changed the stream processor count per CU with the RDNA architecture from 64, this works out to 2,560 stream processors. When combined with a stellar engine boost frequency of up to 1905 MHz, the GPU has a compute throughput of 9.75 TFLOP/s, which is 37 percent higher than that of the RX 590, but 27 percent lower than the Radeon VII, and roughly similar to the RX Vega 56. The RX 5700 XT is armed with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory, although the slide won't mention memory clock-speeds or bandwidth. AMD may disclose pricing and availability in its keynote address later today.

AMD at its 2019 Computex keynote today unveiled the Radeon RX 5000 family of graphics cards that leverage its new Navi graphics architecture and 7 nm silicon fabrication process. Navi isn't just an incremental upgrade over Vega with a handful new technologies, but the biggest overhaul to AMD's GPU SIMD design since Graphics CoreNext, circa 2011. Called RDNA or Radeon DNA, the new compute unit by AMD is a clean-slate SIMD design with a 1.25X IPC uplift over Vega, an overhauled on-chip cache hierarchy, and a more streamlined graphics pipeline.

In addition, the architecture is designed to increase performance-per-Watt by 50 percent over Vega. The first part to leverage Navi is the Radeon RX 5700. AMD ran a side-by-side demo of the RX 5700 versus the GeForce RTX 2070 at Strange Brigade, where NVIDIA's $500 card was beaten. "Strange Brigade" is one game where AMD fares generally well as it is heavily optimized for asynchonous compute. Navi also ticks two big technology check-boxes, PCI-Express gen 4.0, and GDDR6 memory. AMD has planned a July availability for the RX 5700, and did not disclose pricing.