With the new Radeon RX 5700 XT, AMD opens fire on the Nvidia RTX 2070, the current almost obvious choice if you are looking for a good video card for your fast Quad HD (1440p) gaming monitor. A welcome attack, because Nvidia had nothing to fear from AMD in this higher segment for some time and lack of competition leads to higher prices for consumers.
AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
Price From € 429,-Clock speed gpu 1605 – 1905MHz
Memory 8GBGDDR6
Connections DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI
Recommended nutrition 600 watts
Website www.amd.com
9 Score 90
- Pros
- Excellent 1440p performance
- Good price-performance ratio
- Freesync support
- Negatives
- Reference cooling loud
- No Ray Tracing
The days when video card makers simply create the most ultimate imaginable and then we look at what is possible are behind us, most modern graphics chips are made with a conscious target group and cleverly positioned in the market. The Radeon RX 5700 XT is a clear example of this: it's just a few percent faster than Nvidia cards in practically every benchmark. Some games clearly work better on Nvidia or AMD, but on average AMD takes the profit with about 5 percent.
Not a shame in itself, as we see around 60 to 144 FPS depending on how heavy the game is at this higher 1440p resolution; approx. 60 to 90 for the heaviest AAA titles, 120 or higher for lighter esports titles. We can really call that a premium gaming experience. Of course, that also makes it extremely fast in 1080p gaming, but the extra price above the Radeon RX 5700 (without XT) is difficult to justify for lower resolutions.
You can of course spend more, but it is simply not necessary and since the RX 5700 XT is a lot cheaper than its Nvidia counterpart, that makes it very interesting. The fact that Nvidia quickly released an RTX 2070 Super that is slightly (5%) faster than this AMD card does not seem to matter, because it costs 100 euros more.
Even more positive is that for the first time in years AMD has a video card that also competes in terms of consumption, traditionally an advantage of Nvidia. Lower consumption costs less in the long run, and saves cooling in your PC, and AMD is completely up to date thanks to their new 7nm production process.
Provided, but
Nvidia's showpiece is ray tracing, a technique to improve image quality and in theory an advantage. In practice, however, there are only a handful of games that offer it, and we don't really think that is an excuse to pay much more. AMD's Freesync is a more tangible advantage in that regard.
Still, we wouldn't rush to the store for a Radeon RX 5700 XT, because AMD's stock cooler (model shown above) is uncomfortably loud to use and we don't understand why AMD sticks to that design.
Conclusion
As long as it's a lot cheaper than the RTX 2070 Super, AMD's RX 5700 XT is the logical purchase for gamers with a 1440p display. We would just wait for the cards from, for example, Asus, Gigabyte or MSI for a better, much quieter cooling solution.
