RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 Review: Navi makes a solid impression

The past two or three years have been a mixed bag for AMD's graphics wing, unlike its CPU division which has been on a role with Ryzen. The last time it had a major successful launch was three years ago, with Polaris GPUs. The pricey and power hungry Vega, while working as a stopgap solution, never quite took the fight to Nvdia's camp. And considering the 7nm Radeon VII was never meant for pure gaming, AMD had to bring something to table that could not only disrupt Nvidia's Turing line-up but pave the way for future Radeon products.

That something came in the form of 7nm Navi GPU, launched back in July along with 3rd generation Ryzen processors. Apart from bringing all the benefits of a process-shrink, Navi features a new and improved RDNA (Radeon DNA) graphic architecture and replaces GCN (Graphics Core Next) based Vega within AMD's product stack.

While RDNA isn't a complete architectural overhaul, many of its aspects have new elements introduced in almost every level. With RDNA, AMD's focus is on improved single-threaded performance and better utilization of fixed-function hardware. That means RDNA is better suited for gaming whereas GCN was better at handling complex HPC type workloads - part of the reason why AMD still keeps the GCN based Radeon 7 around.

AMD Radeon VII Review: The highend contender

From the center stage of CES last month, AMD gave us the outlines of two major products. One was about Ryzen gen 2 and we expected as much; the other, however, caught many of us off-guard. Not to be out-done by peers from CPU division, RTG (Radeon Technologies Group) announced Radeon VII, world's first 7nm consumer graphics card with 16GB HBM2 video memory. Fast forward a month and the Radeon VII is here with a price tag of $700 (~₹60K). 

AMD Radeon VII and its packaging, click to enlarge

Considering AMD's focus on the mainstream of late, not many anticipated it would be gunning for high-end with its next GPU. But that's exactly what Radeon VII is supposed to do - to take the fight to the likes of Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080. And that's easier said than done as Nvidia has asserted its dominance over the high-end ever since the launch of its RTX 2000 series of graphics cards. Powered by Turing architecture, these GPUs not only routinely outperform AMD's Vega and Polaris based products but also features Real-time Ray Tracing. In our review of GeForce RTX 2060, we saw Nvidia's mid-range card to nibble at the heels of RX Vega64 indicating how desperately AMD needs to update its aging line-up.