Radeon RX 5700

The Radeon RX 5700 is AMD's mainstream RDNA 1 graphics card, released in mid-2019. It marked a significant architectural shift from AMD's long-running GCN heritage, introducing the RDNA design with improved performance-per-watt and a cleaner compute pipeline. The RX 5700 sits below the RX 5700 XT in the lineup and launched at $349 to compete with NVIDIA's RTX 2060 and GTX 1070 Ti.

The card is equipped with 8GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, providing solid bandwidth for its performance tier. RDNA 1 also introduced FidelityFX, AMD's open-source image quality and post-processing toolkit, though it predates the hardware-accelerated FidelityFX Super Resolution that arrived with RDNA 2. There is no hardware ray tracing on this generation — that capability came with RDNA 2 — and no AV1 hardware encoding. The 180W TDP makes it a reasonably efficient card for its class.

The RX 5700 is designed for 1080p gaming at high to ultra settings and can handle 1440p in many titles with settings adjustments. It suits cost-conscious buyers who want a capable mid-range card for everyday gaming without the premium associated with ray tracing hardware. Used market prices make it an appealing option for budget builds.