I’ve been testing Nvidia and AMD’s latest midrange cards over the past couple of weeks, with the intention of finding a clear winner for 1440p gaming.
As it stands, AMD’s aggressive pricing makes the choices at the midrange a lot more difficult, especially as the RX 57 XT are now going head-to-head with Nvidia on performance. That price cut was hugely important because if the Radeon RX 5700 XT had debuted at its original $449 price instead of $399, then Nvidia’s $4 Super would have been easily worth the $50 upgrade. They were also enough to force AMD’s hand to cut the price of the Radeon RX 57 XT graphics cards just two days before their release last month. These cards offer modest speed bumps over the existing RTX cards they are replacing at the same price points. Not to be outdone, Nvidia has also launched its upgraded midrange RTX cards: the RTX 2060 Super ($399) and RTX 2070 Super ($499). Price, performance, and power usage are key at the $300 to $400 price points, and AMD is trying to find a delicate balance of all three with the RX 5700 series. They’re both built on AMD’s new RDNA architecture, and the big promise is that it can provide up to 1.25x performance per clock and 1.5x performance per watt compared to the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture that powered its previous Polaris and Vega GPUs. Now, AMD is setting its sights on Nvidia’s midrange cards with its Radeon RX 5700 ($349) and RX 5700 XT ($399).
So far, its attempts - like the Radeon VII and its new 7nm process, which are designed to compete with Nvidia’s RTX 2080 - have fallen a little flat. AMD has been trying to put a dent in Nvidia’s gaming GPU dominance for years.