AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT and 5700 Navi cards. Dan Baker/Digital Trends
AMD positioned its new Navi RX 5700 cards against Nvidia’s RTX 2060 and 2070, but they turned out to be pretty solid competitors for the new RTX 2060 Super and 2070 Super. Now there are rumors of a new RDNA-based card in the works that’s a little lower down the spectrum. An RX 5600 could be under development and if and when it launches, it could go head to head with Nvidia’s best non-RTX graphics card, the GTX 1660 Ti.
Leaked specifications of a new card AMD is working on come from CompuBench (via The Inquirer) and show a card that is based on the Navi 14 GPU — a lower-end alternative to the Navi 10 used in the RX 5700 XT and 5700. It has 24 compute units (12 less than the 5700) for a total of 1,536 stream processors. It has a high maximum boost frequency of 1,900 MHz, but pairs the GPU with just 4GB of GDDR6.
Considering that AMD already has competitive cards for Nvidia’s midrange RTX cards, it makes sense that any sort of RX 5600 would compete with Nvidia’s more modest GTX GPUs. AMD’s existing RX 500-series cards do a reasonable job there already, with the RX 580 and 590 offering credible competition to the GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660, while the RX 570 is a far more capable card than the GTX 1650.
The 1660 Ti does quite often pip AMD cards with a few extra frames per second, though, so we’d expect the RX 5600 to target that Nvidia card at a competitive price. The 4GB of GDDR6 is of mild concern, as the 1660 Ti’s 6GB of GDDR6 could give it a stiff advantage in some games. Considering the RX 590 and 580 have 8GB a piece, too, we could see the RX 5600 fall behind them in some scenarios, depending on game requirements.
There is no indication at this time about when any such graphics card might release, so we’ll need to hold off for now on making any kind of firm judgments about its potential capabilities. But we would be surprised if AMD didn’t flesh out its RDNA-GPU line in 2019, as two models for a new generation is very restrictive compared to the generations of graphics cards it has released in the past.
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