After years of waiting, AMD is set to launch its first post-GCN architecture graphics cards next month. This is supposed to be a fundamental reset of AMD's graphics processors, tweaking and tuning every element of the design to improve performance and efficiency—or at least, that's the official word.

There are many changes with Navi, the first new GPU architecture for AMD graphics cards since its RX Vega line in 2017, but after the official reveal of specs and pricing at E3 2019, I have to wonder if this is truly new or simply the next iteration on the existing product line. After many years of playing second string to Nvidia's leading parts, I wanted a clear win from AMD. Navi, sadly, doesn't look to be it. AMD claims IPC performance improvements of 25 percent per CU, and says that overall performance per watt will be 50 percent better than its previous generation Vega and Polaris architectures.

That sounds great, but when you dig into the details, it looks like at best AMD might match the performance of Nvidia's RTX 2060 and 2070 GPUs, except AMD will use more power, potentially cost a bit more, and Navi doesn't include any ray tracing or deep learning features. Considering AMD is using TSMC's latest 7nm manufacturing process, it's a bit of a letdown—a lot like the Fiji, Polaris, and Vega GPUs of the past several years.

Perhaps the RX 5700 XT will perform better than I'm expecting, and certainly a price drop would go a long way to make the new cards more attractive. There's a popular saying with computer hardware: There are no bad products, only bad prices. The initial cards could end up being more of an early adopter Founders Edition launch, with a price drop after the first wave. But whatever happens, there's a ton of information to discuss, so let's get to it.


AMD Navi specs, release date, and pricing

Officially, AMD will launch three RX 5700 series cards on July 7, 2019. There will be a limited RX 5700 XT 50th anniversary edition with slightly higher clocks and gold trim, but the two main models are the Radeon RX 5700 XT and the Radeon RX 5700. Here's the short overview of the specs and pricing of the three models, with comparisons to Vega 64 and RX 590/580:


The RX 5700 XT comes with 40 CUs, each with 64 stream processors, for a grand total of 2,560 graphics cores. It will include 8GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 14GT/s, good for 448GB/s of bandwidth. Each core can execute an FMA (fused multiple add) every clock cycle, which means two ops per core, and with a boost clock of 1905MHz that works out to a peak computational rating of 9754 GFLOPS (billions of operations per second). The base clock is 1605MHz, while the new Game Clock is 1755MHz (more on that in a moment). The RX 5700 XT also has 160 texture units and 64 ROPS. AMD rates the 5700 XT at a total board power (TBP) of 225W. It will have a launch price of $449 for the reference model, with custom designs from AMD's graphics cards partners coming after the initial launch.

The RX 5700 XT anniversary edition is identical to the 5700 XT in most specs, but it comes with a shroud signed by AMD CEO Lisa Su, gold accents to replace the typical AMD red, and slightly higher clockspeeds. With a 1980MHz boost clock, that gives a peak performance of 10138 GFLOPS. TBP is slightly higher at 235W, and the price for the limited edition 50th anniversary card is $499.

Stepping down to the RX 5700, AMD disables four CUs on the GPU, giving 2304 total streaming processor cores. That also reduces the texture unit count to 144 (some initial slides from AMD had the wrong figure for TMUs). It still comes with 8GB of 14GT/s GDDR6 memory and 64 ROPS, but clockspeeds are quite a bit lower at 1725MHz boost, 1465MHz base, and 1625MHz for the Game Clock. Using the boost clock, that gives the RX 5700 a peak performance of 7949 GFLOPS, with a substantially lower TBP of 180W. The initial launch price is set to be $379.

AMD is the first to manufacture a consumer graphics card that uses PCIe 4.0. That doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 3.0, though it's important to note that PCIe speed often isn't a major factor in gaming performance. Graphics cards have a bunch of high-speed VRAM to avoid transferring data over the PCIe bus as much as possible. That's because even an x16 PCIe 4.0 link can only transmit up to 31.51GB/s—a fraction of the bandwidth of the GDDR6 memory. There may be a few edge cases where PCIe 4.0 is useful (CrossFire, or GPU compute workloads), but they're more likely to be in the professional space than in consumer graphics.

All three 5700 models use the same 'Navi 10' GPU, which has a maximum of 40 CUs. It's manufactured using TSMC's latest and greatest 7nm FinFET process, the same process that's used on AMD's upcoming Ryzen 3000 CPUs—as well as Apple's A12 SOC that launched in September 2018. AMD lists the transistor count as 10.3 billion, with a die size of 251mm2. That's substantially smaller than Vega 10 (12.5 billion and 495mm2), and compared to Nvidia's TU106 in the RTX 2060/2070 (10.8 billion and 445mm2) AMD has only slightly fewer transistors packed into a far smaller area.


Those are the core specs, but there are a few extra pieces of information that aren't really covered. First, even though the theoretical performance per streaming core is the same—one FMA per clock—AMD has reworked the architecture relative to previous GPUs and claims 25 percent better IPC, and 50 percent better performance per watt.

You can't really compare raw GFLOPS or TFLOPS numbers (billions or trillions of floating point ops per second) among different GPUs anyway, because architectures behave differently. However, if AMD's 25 percent claim is accurate, that means the 9.75 TFLOPS RX 5700 XT should perform close to a 12.19 TFLOPS Vega GPU. The actual Vega 64 is rated at up to 12.66 TFLOPS, and AMD says the 5700 XT is typically slightly faster (though I haven't been able to verify those numbers yet). Keep in mind that Nvidia's GTX 1080 has a theoretical compute performance of 8873 GFLOPS, but outperforms the Vega 64 on average in our gaming tests, so Nvidia still appears to extract more real-world performance from its hardware.

The second item is the new "Game Clock" specification. This is a conservative estimate of the typical clockspeeds users will get from the GPU while playing games. This is basically the same as Nvidia's boost clock—Nvidia's cards routinely run at speeds well above the rated boost clock in my experience—and as Nvidia puts it, it's better to under promise and over deliver than the other way around. So the Game Clock is a change of tune from previous AMD cards where the boost clock was more of an optimistic maximum clock for the GPU. There's just one problem.

AMD is reporting computational performance using the boost clock, or at least it used that number in its E3 press briefings and on the product specs pages. We can't say for certain what clockspeeds the Navi GPUs will use during gaming sessions, but AMD's own statements suggest the Game Clock is a better estimate than the boost clock. That would give the RX 5700 XT a rating of 8986 GFLOPS and the RX 5700 drops to 7488 GFLOPS. But keep in mind what I said just a moment ago about not being able to directly compare GFLOPS to determine gaming performance. Drivers and other elements still factor into the equation, even if Navi does deliver better throughput than previous AMD GPUs.