AMD Big Navi won't kill RX 5700 — here's the proof

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AMD's current range of RX 5700 GPUs will coexist with Big Navi

AMD Radeon 5700 XT
(Image credit: AMD)

With Big Navi – AMD’s rival to the Nvidia RTX 3000 series – just around the corner, as well as GPUs for the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 to produce, the company is certainly busy. As a result, rumors have been growing that AMD’s current top line of PC GPUs are not long for this world.

It turns out that’s not true, and AMD has no immediate plans to pull the plug on the RX 5700 cards. “We are continuing to produce the Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards, which deliver exceptional 1440p gaming experiences,” an AMD spokesperson told our sister site Tom’s Hardware. “We will continue to respond to market demand.” 

Market demand will, in part, depend on how AMD prices its upcoming Big Navi cards. Much of the appeal of AMD’s existing graphics cards is that they offer similar — and in some cases, better — performance than Nvidia’s RTX 2000 series, at a more competitive price.  

While Nvidia has beaten AMD to the punch with its new RTX 3000 series cards, the one thing they most certainly are not is cheap. The RTX 3070 starts at $499, with the 3080 costing $699 and RTX 3090 coming in at $1,499. If AMD’s Big Navi is able to significantly undercut the price while offering solid performance, it’s hard to see too much demand for the existing RX 5700, unless it's also significantly reduced in price.. 

Expectations are already at fever pitch for Big Navi, with one leak revealing that the GPU has the potential to be 40 to 50% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, with two clusters of compute units for a total of 72. That should translate to impressive performance, though of course a lot depends on how well optimized the drivers end up being when it comes down to actual real-world gameplay.

All will be revealed on October 28 when AMD says it will officially unveil all the details of its new GPU, with its Zen 3 CPUs being introduced 20 days earlier. Despite maintaining production of the RX 5700 cards and working on components for next-generation consoles, AMD is apparently not anticipating the same kind of stock shortages that have plagued Nvidia. We shall see. 

Alan Martin
Alan Martin

Freelance contributor Alan has been writing about tech for over a decade, covering phones, drones and everything in between. Previously Deputy Editor of tech site Alphr, his words are found all over the web and in the occasional magazine too. When not weighing up the pros and cons of the latest smartwatch, you'll probably find him tackling his ever-growing games backlog. Or, more likely, playing Spelunky for the millionth time.