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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Gastec - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
Absolutely nothing at all. It's just ranting for the sake of ranting. A.k.a. trolling.psiboy - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
@Zingam Mate they've had good mid range mobile CPU's in laptops for a while now with a whole new Generation coming.. How is it AMD's fault your purchasing people don't do theor homework? You have 1 example to base your entire argument on. If a blind man touches an elephants trunk I fear he feels it is like a snake.. hardly the truth.Da W - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
i believe they have something, they are called PS 5 and XBOX 4 !Gastec - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
We don't give a *censored by Google and the SJW woke armies* about your "mobile".WaltC - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Ryan--looks good--I'll be watching for the flesh-out later....;) I have a polite request--would you be so kind as to put the XT and 5700 together with a Ryzen 3k-series CPU on a x570 mobo and post some D3d12 multi-GPU benchmarks in SotTR? Reason I ask is because I currently have an RX-590/480 8GB X-fire system set up, and running the SotTR in-game bench in d3d12 multi-GPU mode I get ~62 fps @ 3840x2160, ~32fps running only the 590 (@ 1.6GHz), and I was curious as to how two 5700's in tandem might run this game. Also, I use lots of eye-candy--but not all--but it's better than medium settings, imo. I'd actually like to see more X-fire/d3d12 multiGPU results. I bought the RX-480 a couple of years ago, then added the 590 this past X-mas, on a whim, and have been surprised and pleased by how well it runs. Don't know why most sites won't cover multi-GPU anymore--AMD has made it almost idiot-proof these days--no more having to match operating frequencies of the cards, no more having to reboot to turn on/off X-fire in a game profile, etc. Thanks, if you can squeeze it in sometime...;)ballsystemlord - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Not that I intend to do mulit-GPU, but I always wondered why they stopped bench marking it.Ryan Smith - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Unfortunately our GPUs and CPUs are on opposite continents. So I don't have access to Ryzen 3000 at the moment, and Gavin doesn't have a Radeon 5700.WaltC - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Well, when you guys get some time..;) OK, I just finished six hours of driver hell with the 19.7.1's--I haven't seen this kind of behavior out of a GPU driver in > 15 years...! Make a long story short, the 19.7.1's I installed today threw a black screen up at the first initialization point during the Adrenalin's routine install--locked up the display at that point with constant signal to the monitor that kept the screen black. I got out of it, manually, but it was pretty severe--so when I got the desktop back I uninstalled the AMD GPU drivers in toto and thought I'd try it again from scratch, and after I'd made a restore point (Win10x63 18362.1000+)--which I didn't make the first time--woulda', shoulda' coulda', you know how it goes...;) I tried again thinking that maybe the problem was interference from some older driver files. Nah--locked at the first D3d initialization, again, same place, same black screen with same constant signal hard locked (monitor did not lose sync or go to standby for hours unless I powered it off.) It was horrible--it somehow hosed my boot bcd arrangement good--I couldn't even get to safe mode! Any way, it was like getting stuck in fly paper--the more I struggled the worse the mess got until tonight I was despairing of getting back in--nothing worked--! I could boot to my Rufus USB flash drive Win10 installations without a problem--but it was of little use since every time I tried to change my C:\ drive (L:\ when booting from RUFUS USB) the system rejected my attempts--even calling up Sys Restore manually from the X:\ Admin prompt did nothing--because of course it was booting from the wrong drive...;) Arrrgh! Finally I popped in my Macrum Reflect Rescue DVD and thought to have go ahead and simply restore my backup--and lo and behold I noticed a little blurb in the MR UI that said "Want your boot-drive problems fixed?" Yeah!--and selected for that and the MR fixed them at least well enough that I could get into safe mode again and then apply my Sys Restore file. So that was my Marathon in Hell on the day that I ordered my Ryzen 3K series CPU and my Aorus Master...I thought you'd like to know about this because you said you'd had a rough time with the drivers on the 5700's...I can second that loudly for my hardware! It's been many moons since I've seen a GPU driver this bad out of AMD--in fact, I can think of only one other similar incident since 2002, so this is definitely unusual for AMD. You know, my experience was so bad and weird that I could believe it if I heard that some disgruntled (or bribed!) employee at AMD decided to spread a little havoc and rain on AMD's parade today...OK, 'nuff said--I'm sticking with the 19.6.3's until I hear differently!psiboy - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
WaltC I don't install the "optional" drivers such as the 19.7.1 I onlyu install the "recomended" drivers as they have usually passed Microsofts WHQL testing. Thought that might help you not run into those sort of issues with "beta drivers" to quickly again mate. Pays to do your homework!WaltC - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
I don't disagree, and thanks for the comment--but you know, I always update when a new driver is released--and this is the first time in I don't know how many years that I've had this kind of problem! That's why I wrote it up--coupled with the problems Ryan and others have reported here even on the 5700/XT--although they didn't have the problems I did. I'm positive I won't be the only one seeing the problems here. I usually have lots of praise for AMD--but I can't do that when I see something like this. Looks like they might've pushed the card out a couple of months early, as I couldn't find them on Amazon US--or Newegg--which had so few in stock they didn't even have a category for the 5700s. Imagine--I was going to pick up an Anniversary card yesterday anyway but as of this morning can't find one at these outlets!