AMD Announces Radeon RX 5700 XT & RX 5700: The Next Gen of AMD Video Cards Starts on July 7th At $449/$379

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• Acreo_Aeneas - Sunday, June 30, 2019 - link

  I don't think wumpus realizes that Intel owns x86 and but licenses from AMD for x86-64. Without AMD's "AMD64", Intel wouldn't exist today. AMD's designs for the past 15 years (maybe longer) aren't even based on Intel's designs. While they may have been a 2nd-tier manufacturer of Intel-based microprocessors, they haven't been for many years.

• BenSkywalker - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link

  ATi dwarfed nVidia, and AMD almost bought nVidia back in the day but they weren't ok having a competent CEO at the time so the deal fell through. *BOTH* halves of the current AMD were much larger than nVidia, so we have seen with great clarity what they would do if they had every advantage.

• Korguz - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link

  phynaz, the same can be said about nvidia and their own tech demo's from current to their past demos

• evernessince - Wednesday, June 12, 2019 - link

  Um, you do realize many games use compute based shaders right?

• RSAUser - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link

  AMD will have support for the DX ray tracing though?

• mode_13h - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link

  Software support is one thing, dedicated hardware is another.

• wumpus - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link

  So will Intel. Either one will produce a slideshow, but nifty screenshots.

• levizx - Wednesday, June 12, 2019 - link

  The problem for NVIDIA is, when PS5 and Xbox Scarlett hit the shelves, games will use whatever AMD choose to accelerate via hardware, and that may or may not work well with NVIDIA's current design.

• rarson - Thursday, June 20, 2019 - link

  I suspect AMD has been working on a ray tracing hardware solution similar to Tensor cores or something for some time now. They may even have considered implementing it into Navi for consumer GPUs but I imagine even if the performance was there, the increase in die size would push cost above the mid-range market these cards are targeting. There may also have been a time factor involved, ie perhaps the ray tracing performance itself wasn't quite as good as it needed to be to be viable (and AMD has pretty consistently asserted that they feel the technology isn't quite there yet and will support it when it becomes viable... although I think with some time and additional programming effort, Nvidia is finally starting to show some compelling evidence that it is in fact becoming viable).
  
  These two factors (price and performance) lead me to believe that whatever AMD has been working on will show up in the PS5/Xbox Scarlett hardware, especially since both companies (to my surprise) have mentioned ray tracing support. These are "semi-custom" designs, after all, and hardware ray tracing is a nice checkbox for a console feature. This would also explain why consumer Navi is launching so much earlier than the console hardware (I suspected the consoles would launch first, near the beginning of this year, but I was also under the assumption that they were working with Zen+ due to time constraints, so obviously I was very wrong). Given how everything has played out so far, it's clear that AMD needed to launch something as soon as possible and I suspect that due to price and performance concerns, it just made more sense to launch Navi without it.
  
  I gotta admit, I'm a little disappointed with the lack of HDMI 2.1 though. As someone who often games on a TV, I would hate to spend $450 on a brand new GPU that won't be able to do VRR over HDMI when I finally upgrade my TV (then again, I'm not planning on doing that for a while, but still).

• Spoelie - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link

  Even beyond features, i'm disappointed by the board power. Assuming close to performance parity
  
  RTX 2070 - 12nm - 180W
  5700 XT - 7nm - 225W
  
  AMD isnt really there yet