At E3 2019, AMD has launched its first two graphics cards in the 7nm Navi family, the Radeon RX 5700 and the 5700 XT.
Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, made the announcement at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big game trade show in Los Angeles this week. It’s been a good week for AMD, considering on Sunday Microsoft announced that AMD’s processor and graphics chips would be used in Project Scarlett, which is Microsoft’s new game console coming in the holidays of 2020.
The Ryzen 9 3950X has 16 cores, 32 threads, 4.7-GHz boost frequency, 3.5 GHz base frequency, and 72 megabytes of cache. It runs on 105 watts and will be shipping in September, Su said. And she said it is competitive with the competing Intel i9-9900K processor at less than half the price of what Intel is charging.
This new 16-core beast being on the AMD AM4 platform, though, changes the value dynamic; Threadripper’s TR4-socket/X399-chipset platform has a presumptive higher cost of entry.
Beyond the new 16-core chip, AMD spoke at length about the advancements made in the Zen 2 architecture that have made their way into every new gaming-focused 3rd Generation Ryzen CPU from the company, including the Ryzen 5, the Ryzen 7, and the other Ryzen 9s with fewer cores.
The Radeon RX 5700 GPU series uses a brand new design that AMD is calling RDNA, or Radeon DNA, built on the Navi architecture platform. The company promises a brand new compute unit building block, improved cache hierarchy, and more efficient graphics pipeline, for 1.25x better better performance per clock and 1.5x better performance per Watt than current Radeon RX500-series products.
Starting with the Radeon RX 5700 XT, the GPU has 40 RDNA compute units with 2,560 stream processors, for up to 9.75 Teraflops of bandwith. It will run at a 1605MHz base clock with a 1755MHz ‘game clock’ speed and up to 1905MHz turbo speed. Graphics cards based on this GPU will have 8GB of GDDR6 RAM on a 256-bit bus for 448GBps of memory bandwidth. Board power is rated at 225W.
The Radeon RX 5700 will feature 36 compute units with 2,304 stream processors. Its base, game clock and turbo speeds are 1465MHz, 1625MHz and 1725MHz respectively. It will also feature 8GB of GDDR6 RAM on a 256-bit bus, and board power is a more modest 180W.
Last but certainly not least is new AMD Radeon Software Adrenaline 2019 Edition version 19.7.1 (whew, that’s a mouthful) launching July 7. It boasts a slew of new features including anti-lag tech that aims to improve input-to-display response times and AMD Radeon Image Sharpening, an intelligent sharpening technology that looks far more compelling than Nvidia’s DLSS tech.
This post-processing effect has little to no performance impact (around one percent) and best yet, supports thousands of new and old games. You will need an RX 5700 series GPU to utilize it, however.
