RX 5700 vs RTX Super – Should AMD OR NVIDIA Be Worried?

So yesterday we published our NVIDIA RTX Super review, and if you’re interested in learning more you can check it out right here. But in it we actually had a difficult time coming up with a conclusion because we didn’t know how well the AMD RX 5700 series would compete against NVIDIA’s new GPUs. However, with all of yesterday’s benchmarks done, could we accurately predict where the RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 would land in comparison to the RTX 2070 Super any RTX 2060 Super. Did NVIDIA get their older GPUs out of trouble just in time or does AMD now have a serious problem? Well it turns out that AMD did publish some pretty specific performance numbers at E3 and that might lead to some interesting comparison.

All right so I’m going to start things off by making something very, very clear. You should not take this as a scientifically accurate article and you should definitely not use this to make any purchasing decisions. In fact, this whole article started as a fun little test to see how accurate AMD’s E3 presentation was. But now with the new RTX Super cards around we might be able to use AMD’s own numbers to estimate how well the RX 5700 series will compete when they finally launch next week. So let’s start with what AMD showed.

It was the top chart for the RX 5700 which showed a 2% to 21% advantage over the RTX 2060 Founders Edition. While bottom chart had everything from a 3% loss to a 22% gain when the RX 5700 XT was compared against the RTX 2070 Founders Edition. Those are pretty impressive numbers. I want to pause here for a bit because I realized that these 10 games are the ones that we use in our own benchmarking process, while Far Cry New Dawn has nearly identical performance results as Far Cry 5 since it uses the same game engine. Now that got Mike and I thinking about how the results would line up against the benchmarks we used in the RTX Super Series article from yesterday. So basically we used those percentages and extrapolated from our results. Great in theory right? Well you guys can hate on this as much as you want, but it will be really cool to see how the numbers line up when we’ve posted our full review of the RX 5700 series. So before we get into what we came up with, let me explain to you why this is a quick and fun little comparison that we wanted to try rather than being super serious.

First of all, according to AMD’s testing notes, they used a stock Core i9-9900K and we used an overclocked Core i9-9900X to eliminate any CPU bottlenecks, but luckily these games aren’t CPU limited at 1440P resolution. We also have no idea which scenes AMD chose to benchmark with, yet improvements are usually seen across the entire game and not just a single scene. However, AMD’s chart says that they used the best performing API for both GPUs and to us that means each game comparison could have been mixed DX9/DX11 or DX12 results, which is super odd and a bit misleading. Finally, we decided to include the RTX 2070 Founders Edition but not the RTX 2060 Founders Edition, and that’s because the RTX 2060 Founders Edition isn’t pre-overclocked so I just used a stock RTX 2060 in its place. Plus we know how AMD used Founders Edition GPUs since they mentioned it in a PCWorld livestream last week.

But let’s get into what we found starting with Assassin Creed. The Supers actually do improve quite a bit, and adding the 2% improvements for the RX 5700 and the RX 5700 XT doesn’t really change things by all that much. Then again, moving to Battlefield V tells a whole different story and there seems to be some pretty good improvements with the Super cards. Adding the RX 5700 series, AMD is claiming 22% and 21% improvements for the XT and the non-XT cards over the RTX Founders Editions, and that’s huge, especially since these two cards costs less than NVIDIA’s Super series. On the surface of things the Supers do well in Far Cry 5, but add the 5% and 12% stated by AMD’s presentation and they’re still trailing the RTX 2070 and RTX 2060 Super, but really not buy all that much. This is likely why NVIDIA priced their GPUs so close.

Metro Exodus is a pretty interesting title too, since it is an NVIDIA friendly title, but AMD claims between 15% to 16% improvements over the original RTX 2070 and RTX 2060 and that seems really impressive. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is also worth focusing on since AMD was pretty open about showing the RX 5700 XT losing by 3% and the RX 5700 winning by 6%. Pop figures into our chart and this is what you get. I won’t make any conclusions, but like I said, it’s nice to see a company admitting where some of the improvements are needed. Finally, there’s Witcher 3, which hasn’t been a really kind title for AMD since it was released. However, it’s still an awesome game, and once again the AMD cards slide right in between the Super series. However, imagine if those cards weren’t launched, NVIDIA could have been in some trouble.

So looking at the results, they should give you at least a vague idea about how AMD claims that the RX 5700 series GPUs will stack up against the RTX Super cards. Now, as I mentioned at the very beginning of this article, please do take these unscientific results with a grain of salt, and I’m completely aware that we’ll get hate from both sides. But heck, I think that this was a pretty cool comparison either way. Now, what I’m really looking forward to seeing is how these numbers turn out in reality when the RX 5700 XT and the RX 5700 reviews get published next week. Super stoked for that, but based on all of this, it’s possible that NVIDIA may have been a bit too conservative with the Super series pricing. Maybe all they did was to avoid the RX 5700 series rather than competing with it, but that could also mean that AMD is in a pretty good position.

Personally, I think the most important aspect is the Radeon lineup has finally been able to achieve good results against the RTX series at similar power consumption numbers. Remember the RX 5700 XT has a board power of 225 watts and the RX 5700 needs 185 watts. However, NVIDIA needed to really push their 12nm process here with the RTX 2070 Super at 215 watts and the RTX 2060 Super at 175 watts. So should AMD be worried? Well if we use their benchmark numbers, absolutely not. But we’re just gonna have to wait and hold our breath for just a bit longer so that we can paint the whole picture as to what both teams are offering, especially for the price points. And we’ll have scientific results to prove that.