I’ll have a fuller story on the Radeon 5700 XT, the bigger of AMD’s new 7nm graphics cards, later today. But there’s one small thing worth calling out ahead of that.
If you’ve followed any of the coverage around AMD’s new GPUs, you’ll have seen plenty of commentary about how much power it uses, performance per dollar comparisons, average frame rates and so on. Most of that holds up, and I’ll get into a bit of it myself and how the card holds up in the Australian market particularly.
But there’s one anomaly that I wanted to just highlight with a special video: the part where a $620 AMD card manages to beat a $1749 RTX 2080 Ti reference card.
It only happens in one game. I’m talking about Forza Horizon 4, which Turn 10 and Playground Studios optimised the hell out of for consoles. It runs supremely well on PCs too, but it shouldn’t be any surprise that the work done making FH4 shine on consoles built on AMD hardware with the older GCN architecture has paid off in spades with a brand new AMD card.
It raises an interesting question not so much for the 5700 XT, but what might be by the end of 2020, and throughout the next generation as more developers begin optimising for consoles built on AMD hardware. Will more games start to favour AMD cards as much?
If the last couple of years is any guide, probably not. But it’s nice to see the $629 card have its day in the sun against a rival that costs almost three times as much. The RTX 2080 Ti still beats it in 4K of course — the extra memory is too great an advantage — but it’s nice all the same to witness just how much performance can be squeezed out when you’re really, really good at your job.
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