AMD’s ATI-inspired, Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 XT is 37% faster than the RX 590

The specs for AMD’s Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics cards have been leaked ahead of the Next Horizon Gaming event scheduled in LA tomorrow. Yes, Videocardz perennial leak machine seems to have once more come up with the goods, snagging a snap of a pair of important slides from tomorrow’s E3 Navi and Ryzen reveals.

The upcoming Radeon RX 5700 XT specs are front and centre, with the card offering 37% higher performance than the Polaris-based RX 590 it’s replacing as AMD’s fastest mainstream GPU. The new Navi graphics silicon is based on the brand new AMD RDNA architecture, though reportedly ‘brand new’ might be a little strong for the vanguard of Navi GPUs given that this first chip has been called a hybrid stop-gap measure, using a modified version of the GCN architecture.

There is also the first tangible leak about the highest-spec CPU in AMD’s Ryzen 3000 range… that elusive 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 chip. The AMD Ryzen 9 3950X, for that is the name of the beast, is reportedly the second dual-chiplet AM4 processor and the CPU that will have made Intel issue its “real-world gaming” challenge.

Both the graphics card specs and processor slides, have come from the same source, and Videocardz claims to have verified the authenticity of both the images. The site has been spot on in the past, and given the temporal proximity of the event I’d be very inclined to believe that they’re not bogus.

But, y’know, pinch of salt, leeks… it’s a whole unconfirmed ragu, in other words.

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Anyways, the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT will be the first Navi-based card, and the top RX 5700-series GPU. Its cards generally get released in pairs, but this time they’ll both seemingly have the same code number, but a different suffix. Yes, AMD is going retro with its naming conventions, harking back to the old ATI days and the X1900 XT, et al. And it looks like it’s doing it with a hell of a card.

The new GPU will come with 4 CUs and 2,560 RDNA cores, and sport total processing power of up to 9.75 TFLOPS. Compare that with the RX 590 and you’re looking at a 37% performance increase with just another 256 Navi 7nm cores. So long as it’s running at it’s full boost clock, that is.

So, one interesting thing to note is the existence of the Game Clock that’s being reported in the leaked slide. There is a Boost Clock spec that is far higher than the touted game-specific frequency. That sounds vaguely reminiscent of the Radeon VII and the 1,800MHz ‘peak engine speed’ AMD was reporting prior to the card’s release with a 1,750MHz Boost clock speed.

Going by the old ATI naming scheme, the RX 5700 XT will be followed by an RX 5700 Pro. Though there is also the old ‘GT’ and ‘XTX’ suffixes that AMD could bring out of mothballs too for lower and higher power RX 5700-series cards respectively… there’s already been speculation there could be four or five Navi cards announced tomorrow.

The second leaked AMD slide shows the ‘world’s first 16-core gaming CPU,’ which seems like the processor Intel was preempting with its own ‘gaming performance for the real world’ event at E3 today.

The Ryzen 9 3950X is not only the chip with the highest core-count of all the Ryzen 3000 CPUs, it’s also got the highest Turbo core clock speed too at 4.7GHz. It’s set to be a monster of a chip with the Zen 2 architecture promising a ~13% higher IPC than the previous generation silicon.

It’s only Sunday and E3 really is kicking off…