The AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT & RX 5700 Review: Navi Renews Competition in the Midrange Market
by Ryan Smith on July 7, 2019 12:00 PM ESTDrivers, Observations, & the Test
With the launch of a new GPU architecture also comes the launch of new drivers, and the teething issues that come with those. We’ll go over performance matters in greater detail on the following pages, but to start things off, I wanted to note the state of AMD’s driver stack, and any notable issues I ran into.
The big issue at the moment is that while AMD’s drivers are in fairly good shape for gaming, the same cannot be said for compute. Most of our compute benchmarks either failed to have their OpenCL kernels compile, triggered a Windows Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR), or would just crash. As a result, only three of our regular benchmarks were executable here, with Folding@Home, parts of CompuBench, and Blender all getting whammied.
And "executable" is the choice word here, because even though benchmarks like LuxMark would run, the scores the RX 5700 cards generated were nary better than the Radeon RX 580. This a part that they can easily beat on raw FLOPs, let alone efficiency. So even when it runs, the state of AMD's OpenCL drivers is at a point where these drivers are likely not indicative of anything about Navi or the RDNA architecture; only that AMD has a lot of work left to go with their compiler.
So while I’m hoping to better dig into the compute implications of AMD’s new GPU architecture at a later time, for today’s launch there’s not going to be a lot to say on the subject. Most of our usual (and most informative) tools just don’t work right now.
As for the gaming side of matters, things are a lot better. Compared to some past launches, I’ve encountered a surprisingly small amount of “weirdness” with AMD’s new hardware/drivers on current games. Everything ran, and no games crashed due to GPU issues (outright bugs, on the other hand…).
The only game I’d specifically flag here is Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, a DirectX 11 game. With an unlocked framerate, this is not a benchmark that runs incredibly smoothly to begin with; and the RX 5700 series cards seemed to fare a bit worse here. The amount of (additional) stuttering was easy enough to pick up with my eyes, and the game’s own reporting tools recorded it as well. It is not a night and day difference since the game doesn’t start from a great place, but it’s clear that AMD has some room to tighten up its drivers as far as frame delivery goes.
Finally, for whatever reason, the RX 5700 cards wouldn’t display the boot/BIOS screens when hooked up to my testbed monitor over HDMI. This problem did not occur with DisplayPort, which is admittedly the preferred connection anyhow. But it’s an odd development, since this behavior doesn’t occur with Vega or Polaris cards – or any other cards I’ve tested, for that matter.
Meanwhile, as a reminder, here is the list of games for our 2019 GPU benchmarking suite.
| AnandTech GPU Bench 2019 Game List | ||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | |
| Shadow of the Tomb Raider | Action/TPS | Sept. 2018 | DX12 | |
| F1 2019 | Racing | Jun. 2019 | DX12 | |
| Assassin's Creed Odyssey | Action/Open World | Oct. 2018 | DX11 | |
| Metro Exodus | FPS | Feb. 2019 | DX12 | |
| Strange Brigade | TPS | Aug. 2018 | Vulkan | |
| Total War: Three Kingdoms | TBS | May. 2019 | DX11 | |
| The Division 2 | FPS | Mar. 2019 | DX12 | |
| Grand Theft Auto V | Action/Open world | Apr. 2015 | DX11 | |
| Forza Horizon 4 | Racing | Oct. 2018 | DX12 | |
And here is the 2019 GPU testbed.
| CPU: | Intel Core i9-9900K @ 5.0GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Z390 Taichi |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Phison E12 PCIe NVMe SSD (960GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Trident Z RGB DDR4-3600 2 x 16GB (17-18-18-38) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT AMD Radeon RX 5700 AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 AMD Radeon RX 580 AMD Radeon RX 570 AMD Radeon R9 390X NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2070 Super Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2060 Super Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2060 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 431.15 AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.7.1 |
| OS: | Windows 10 Pro (1903) |
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Ryan Smith - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
251mm2.ballsystemlord - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Thanks!eastcoast_pete - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
@Ryan: Thanks for the initial review! If I read it correctly, AMD is at risk of (again) screwing up on the driver side. I really hope that they get on this pronto, and put their collective backs into it. Even great hardware can suck if the software is buggy.moozoo - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
"In short, OpenCL doesn't have any good champions right now."Actually Intel, especially with their new discrete graphics card coming up. They would be mad to start a new GPU computer API and I'd expect Its unlike they would join AMD with Rocm or Nvidia with CUDA.
Intel's fpga's also have opencl and its an obvious direction for them.
They have been pushing intel ispc lately (unreal physics) for the cpu so it is not impossible they could push a gpu based version of that, but I think that's unlikely. ispc is more about pushing their cpu's avx512 against amd.
Also about fp64, I didn't see it mentioned anyway. for the minority like me that care, according to techpowerup it is 1:16 which would be great as I feared they would drop it all together as Intel has with Gen11. The techpowerup 5700xt entry is at https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-rx-57...
FourEyedGeek - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
How effective is ray tracing on a RTX 2060 Super, it is all well and good to have a feature, but if most people who purchase the card do not enable it due to the massive performance hit, is the price premium worth it?To me it seems like the 5700 is a fantastic price to performance option, and the 2070 Super is the realistic minimum GPU you'd want if utilising ray tracing.
webdoctors - Thursday, July 11, 2019 - link
i don't have a card or the games but I think on a 2060 Super you'd be able to do really great at 1080P with RT. Honestly I'd rather have ray tracing and 1080P than non-RT at 4K.https://wccftech.com/geforce-gtx-ray-tracing-1080p...
This link shows the non-super 2060 hitting 60 FPS in Metro and Justice Tech so the 2060 Super should be great. I've seen demos like Bioshock with raytracing on and its just amazing. Ppl complaining about RT just doesn't make sense, the idea and tech has been around for decades and used by movie studios because its not the hacky way of visualization and its what your eyes perceive.
I'm glad we're having some evolution in gaming after DX11 in graphics thats in real image quality and not just the polygon increase the last few years. Sure its not cheap but Intel and AMD also doing it so the prices should come down when its standard. Look at how much SSD and DDR4 have dropped.
Bensam123 - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
No testing of input delay or anti-lag? Definitely one of the things I think a lot of gamers are looking forward to the most if they've heard about it and if they haven't they'll be interested once they do.That aside one of the most interesting things in the benchmarks is that the 5700XT is beating the 2070S in some 1080p tests, sometimes by a large margin. Given most gamers, especially competitive ones play at 1080p that's a pretty big deal.
isthisavailable - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
I want AMD to make a 2080ti super competitor (navi 20?), and stick 2 of those together on a single PCB, putting PCIe 4.0 to good use and taking the performance crown from Nvidia.jjj - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
lol going backwards in terms of perf per dollar vs Vega 56.Both Nvidia and AMD should be squashed by regulators in a sane world as this is ridiculous.
eva02langley - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
Idiot...https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1870/ben...