'Navi' Gets Real: AMD Announces New Radeon RX 5700 GPUs

TAIPEI—AMD has announced the first teasers around its new range of Radeon "Navi"-based GPUs at Computex 2019, focusing on getting reduced latency and higher-bandwidth performance out of the next generation of gaming PCs and future consoles.

The first Navi family, dubbed the Radeon RX 5000 and starting with a Radeon RX 5700 subclass, is built upon an all-new Radeon DNA (RDNA) architecture. RDNA is the successor to Graphics Core Next (GCN), and comprises a whole new GPU architecture. The cards use GDDR6 memory.

The new GPUs also use a new compute unit design, which AMD claims improves efficiency and enables increased instructions per clock (IPC). The cards will also be the first PCI Express 4.0-enabled graphics cards, able to make use of the new higher-speed bus debuting on AMD X570 motherboards rolling out at the show this week.

AMD claims that the Navi GPUs will deliver increases of 1.25x on performance per clock, and 1.5x or better on performance per watt, versus GCN. The company is confident enough in RDNA's capabilities that company CEO and president Dr. Lisa Su said in AMD's Computex leadoff keynote that these innovations would "power the foundation of gaming for the next decade."

Firing Up 'Navi'

To demonstrate Navi's prowess, AMD compared one of the new GPUs with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070, in a benchmark session using the video game Strange Brigade. According to AMD, its new GPU gets 10 percent better frame-rate performance than its competitor, although it's always worth taking such claims with a pinch of salt (and the consideration that it is just one game) until the first cards are released and tested by third parties.

AMD says that another application of its new GPUs will be Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5, which was hinted at by Sony's Mark Cerny, the lead architect for the PS4, last month. This new technology means that the console will be able to offer up to 8K visuals for gamers, as long as you have a suitable television to support them.

The first of the range of Navi-based discrete-video-card products, the Radeon RX 5700 Series, will be available in July. In terms of product SKU specifics, AMD is keeping its cards close to its chest at the moment but will be sharing more information at E3 2019, including card specs, greater detail about the chips' performance, and the prices, although it has been rumored that the first cards will retail at $399. (That would be an interesting matchup versus the GeForce RTX 2070 indeed.)

AMD also announced its new Ryzen 7 3rd Generation CPUs, which we're in the process of writing up, and the Ryzen 9 3900X processor, a 12-core, 24-thread chip, all of which will launch on July 7.