To be clear, AMD is only target mid-range performance with these GPUs. Its high-end offering is still the Radeon VII, a 7nm card built on its older architecture. But the new cards are still significant for the company, since they're the start of an entirely new generation of graphics technology. As a surprise, AMD also unveiled a $499 50th anniversary edition of the 5700XT, which will feature boost speeds up to 1.98GHz, as well as a unique gold and black shroud.

New features in the Radeon 5700 cards include FidelityFX, an open source toolkit that can improve visual quality, like making the roads in a racing game sharper. Radeon Image Sharpening will offer a similar visual upgrade for games that don't support FidelityFX, and AMD says both features won't impact performance. Esports players will also appreciate Radeon Anti-Lag, which helps to reduce lag between your GPU and monitor. Typically, that's something players handle by trying to drive their FPS performance as high as possible. The feature managed to drop around 15ms worth of lag compared to NVIDIA's RTX 2070.