AMD didn’t provide the specs of its upcoming Radeon RX 5700 GPUs, only that the lineup will be codenamed Navi, and will be based on a brand new architecture, RDNA, designed specifically for gamers. The only established fact is that the RX 5700 cards will go up against NVIDIA’s RTX 2070 and possibly the RTX 2060.
According to SweClockers, the first gen Navi cards won’t leverage a completely new architecture but instead will incorporate elements of both RDNA as well as GCN. The reason being that GCN has been around for almost a decade now, and most games are optimized for it. Considering, AMD’s pace of churning out driver updates, it wouldn’t wise to just throw away all those optimizations without preparing the modern game engines for RDNA.
So while the RX 5700 cards will integrate many new features of the new macro-architecture, such as a new Compute engine allowing a higher shader and ROP count, a multi-level cache hierarchy for reduced latency and an improved pipeline for higher clocks, and of course, a more efficient process for more performance per watt. They will still retain many components of GCN to maintain compatibility with existing games and engines. The 2nd Gen Navi cards (Navi 20?) will most likely leverage a brand new architecture, without any of the vestiges of GCN, and will compete in the high-end segment of the GPU market, alongside the RTX 2080 and maybe even the RTX 2080 Ti.
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