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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rUmX - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
It's no longer the same architecture. RDNA vs GCN. The fact that a 36 CU (5700) consistently beats Vega 56 (56 CU) shows the design changes. Sure part of it is clock speeds and having 64 ROPs but still Navi is much more efficient than GCN, and it's doing it with much less shaders. Imagine a bigger Navi can match it exceed the 2080 TI.Kevin G - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Not all those transistors are for the improved CUs either. There is a new memory controller to support GDDR6, new video codec engine and some spent on the new display controller to support DSC for 4K120 on DP 1.4.peevee - Thursday, July 11, 2019 - link
Why would GDDR6 need substantially more transistors than GDDR5? Video codec seems more or less the same also.Looks like there are some hidden features not enabled yet, hard to explain that increase in transistors per stream processor (not CU) otherwise (CUs are just twice as wide).
Meteor2 - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
I was wondering the same thing.JasonMZW20 - Tuesday, July 16, 2019 - link
Because it's now a VLIW2 architecture via RDNA. Each CU is actually a dual-CU set (2x32SPs, 64 SPs total) and is paired with another dual-CU to form of workgroup processor (4x32) or 128 SPs. Tons of cache has been added and rearranged. This requires space and extra logic.Geometry engines (via Primitive Units) are fully programmable and are no longer fixed function. This also requires extra logic. Rasterizer, ROPs, and Primitive Unit with 128KB L1 cache are closely tied together.
Navi definitely replaces both Polaris and Vega 10/20 for gaming, so average out Polaris 30 (5.7B) and Vega 10 (12.5B) transistor amounts and you'll be somewhere near Navi 10. Vega 20 is still great at compute tasks, so I don't see it being phased out in professional markets soon.
Cooe - Tuesday, March 23, 2021 - link
... RDNA is NOT VLIW (like Terascale) ANYTHING. It's still exclusively a scaler SIMD architecture like GCN.tipoo - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Do those last (at least two) Beyond3D tests look a little suspect to anyone? Multiple AMD generations all clustering around 1.0, almost looks like a driver cap.rUmX - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Ugh no edit... I meant "Big Navi can match or exceed 2080 TI".Kevin G - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Looking at the generations it doesn't surprise me about the RX 580 but it is odd to see the RX 5700 there, especially when Vega is higher. An extra 20% of bandwidth for the RX 5700 via compression would go a long way at 4K resolutions.Ryan Smith - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
It's a weird situation. The default I use for the test is to try to saturate the cards with several textures; however AMD's cards do better with just 1-2 textures. I'll have a longer explanation once I get caught up on writing.From my notes: (in GB/sec, random/black)
UINT8 1 Tex: 333/472
FP32 1 Tex: 445/469
UNIT8 6 Tex: 389/406
FP32 6 Tex: 406/406