Radeon 5700 & 5700XT Launch Coverage & Testing

AMD's gaming division is on fire! In a good way!  

With the launch of AMD's Navi-based RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT, AMD is signaling a pretty bright future for its graphics division, for desktop and PC gaming. AMD is already well-established in just about all other industries that require high-end graphics: Consoles, Cloud (with Google Stadia), Mobile (via Samsung Partnership) and with Apple, in their laptops, desktop and workstation computers. Even though the 5700 and the 5700XT are not "flagship" graphics cards per se, they are an incredibly important strategically to AMD because they are built on a totally new microarchitecture – RDNA.  

As this is a new microarchitecture, there is a lot here beyond just game performance. We've enlisted the help of EposVox to help us with some of the computing, rendering and streaming tests. (Quite frankly, our results didn't make any sense; we were certain we were doing something wrong. Keep reading to learn more.)  

We, of course, put these cards up against the MSI GamingZ RTX 2070 Twin Frozr 7; which is a beastly card and clocks like a champ. A few of our tests also compare against the MSI RTX 2060.  

These new cards from AMD are approximately in the same price class, but priced a little better.  Nvidia also fired back – launching the new Super series graphics cards.  AMD reacted quickly and tweaked the Navi launch prices a bit, which sweetened the deal even a bit further.  

We are reviewing the AMD launch-version 5700 and 5700 XT, graciously supplied by AMD; thanks AMD!  

It's in RDNA 

"NAVI" is not just about RDNA – it's a 7nm fabrication process, GDDR6, PCIe 4.0, the new Radeon Media Engine and the Radeon Display Engine.  

RDNA is a new compute unit design that is designed for diverse workloads. It incorporates a multi-level cache hierarchy and eschews on-chip HBM memory (as found on predecessor cards like the Fury, Vega and the Radeon VII) for a more cost-effective and traditional GDDR6 approach.  

While the Radeon VII is a bit faster than the Radeon RX 5700XT that we tested, the RX 5700 XT performed at a much lower power and has a lot of new killer features.  

RDNA delivers 1.5X performance per watt, and 2.3x performance per silicon area @ 7nm (vs 14nm of RX Vega 64). 

Game Clocks 

AMD has introduced some new terminology – Game Clocks. They sampled the top 25 AAA titles and looked at how well the card was boosting. They felt that, in the market place, the boost clock advertising was unreasonably high because most gamers would never see clocks anywhere close to the boost clocks. So, the "Game Clock" term comes in to play – Gamers, if you're playing a popular game you should see your graphics card boosting from its base clock to somewhere around the game clock. If you don't see that on average, it may indicate you've got a thermal or other problem with your system. 

If your system provides adequate airflow and you're playing a common game (on a common engine) your average clocks should be around the game clock. 

Based on our testing, I'd say the game clock is about right, if a little conservative. It was a useful tool for spotting, for example, a case that did not have sufficient intake.  

Blowers!? We don't need no stinkin' blowers!  

A lot of gamers will "frown" on blower coolers, but they're good in some scenarios. For OEMs and volume purchasers, the blowers are preferred because they directly exhaust air out the case. If you have a case that is airflow constrained, you will want a blower. One of my favorite machines in the lab right now is a Dr. Zaber mini-ITX system and since adding a blower style RTX 2080, the overall system temperature is lower (vs an AIB Axial design card that I was running before). With an axial card, it is up to the system integrator or builder to take the heat exhausted from the card into the case by the axial fans and then get that heat out of the case.  

Of course I would guess there will be more versions of this card in the very near future.  

Connections  

The HDMI interface is 2.0b; I'm not sure why the new HDMI standard couldn't have been implemented. It does have DisplayPort 1.4 HDR, and Display Stream Compression 1.2a. That means it can push 4k/240Hz, 4k HDR 120Hz and 8k HDR 60Hz display modes. It has 3 DP 1.4 connections and the single HDMI port at the rear. 

What about Gaming?  

Be sure to checkout our video if you like charts, graphs, and visuals to go with our tabular data!  

Shadow of the Tomb Raider: 

Monster Hunter World: 

CIV VI:

Settings:

Several more tests are in the YouTube videos; check it out.  

RDNA & Navi are About More than Gaming  

For the "first" pass at Radeon Media Engine, AMD has just about blown it out of the water. There are some bugs that EposVox and I go more into in the YouTube videos (linked here, here, and here) but those will be solved in short order. Mostly those bugs are around "glue" necessary to plug applications like DaVinci Resolve and ffmpeg into the new Radeon Media Engine. 

We had some trouble initially with getting OBS to work with the Radeon Media Engine hardware, but this was really just down to UI strangeness and odd defaults in OBS. The performance of the hardware encoder was overall quite good. 

Both the RX 5700 and the RX 5700XT offer hardware h264 and HEVC encoding. In short, these cards vastly outperform even the 2080Ti for encoding workloads. Anything less than a 2080Ti is not even in the same time zone for encoding workloads. There is, no doubt, going to be a lot of coverage of this.  

Strangely, this wasn't something AMD really plugged too much at E3. It was mentioned on a single slide and work with OBS was mentioned a couple of times by different presenters at the E3 event.  

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DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere are fully functional for H265 accelerated encoding workloads, (truly face-melting!) but H264 has some bugs. I got confirmation from AMD that their respective teams are aware of the issues and are working through it.  

One contemplates a tiny, but beastly, "unlimited stream" Plex media and encode/decode server that "just works" and one doesn't have to fool with any stream-unlock hocus-pocus as you do with Team Green-powered Plex media servers. Even imagining Google Stadia based on this hardware encoder would be a game-changer (haha, my puns) in terms of bandwidth and latency reduction for gamers.  

Beyond encoder performance, AMD is positioning itself for differentiation from the competition by innovating in other ways. Radeon Anti-lag and Content Adaptive Sharpening (CAS – a part of Fidelity FX – a suite of visual enhancements for games) are by far the most compelling examples I've seen so far.  

Radeon Anti-lag software changes the way the CPU and GPU work together to render frames. The area of lag reduction is mainly around delays in the software stack where the CPU might complete work for a video frame far ahead of when the GPU is ready. Astute readers may be getting visions of technologies like "Fast Sync" or "Enhanced Sync" but anti-lag is neither of those things. With those technologies the application rendering frames essentially runs unconstrained and the nearest frame is displayed on the monitor when the monitor is ready to begin displaying it (VSync). This may mean you have frames that are actually rendered, but never displayed, which might be perceived by the end user. It's also not helpful in scenarios where the frame rendering rate is GPU limited.  

We did some high-speed camera testing with Pixio PX277 144hz 2560x1440 monitors and a few DX11 titles. There was not a lot of time to test, but we could consistently record latency differences between our "MeanGreen" and "RedHead" test systems. The best-case-scenario for Nvidia was GTA V running in DX11 mode at 1080p running at 120 fps with fast sync on; the input delay was still 7ms longer than just toggling "Anti-lag" on with the identical RX 5700XT setup on the competing system.  

Often, anti-lag reduced the time from when our mouse was clicked to the first frame showing the response by 1 or more frames.  

Currently, it is limited to DirectX11 titles (DirectX9 is supported currently, but has a critical bug; DirectX12 support may appear in the future).  

Content Adaptive Sharpening is a sharpening algorithm that is computationally cheap (meaning that gamers that elect to use it should not have any real loss of performance in terms of frame-rates at a given resolution) but that doesn't sharpen areas of a given frame that are already high contrast.  

AMD provided numerous examples from many popular games showing the effect. For me, the most impressive effect was playing a game at 1440p, then scaling it up to 4k with this feature on. From my eye, which admittedly requires heavy prescriptive correction, it looked good. Perhaps even easily the best upscaled graphics I've ever seen. This is a viable option for gamers who have a 4k monitor, for productivity reasons but want to play at "4k" to avoid monitor display resolution switching jiggery-pokery. (Related: Windows 1903 generally tries NOT to change the "native" resolution of an LCD now). If you change your resolution from 3840x2160 to 1920x1080 generally Windows will keep displaying at 3840x2160 but use the scaling hardware in the graphics card to scale 1920x1080 to 3840x2160. Not in all scenarios, but this is done to "switch" between resolutions faster. 

The display stream compression technology cannot get here fast enough – it will allow DP 1.4 to carry high-refresh 4k signals, and heralds a new era of no-compromises monitor selection. It should allow individuals to select both high res and high refresh in one monitor.  

What about Linux?  

Linux is very promising, but there are some bugs. AMD and Valve (and, for that matter Google) are doing some pretty great things together for Linux and in the open source space. Linux always lags behind new launches a bit and I am content to wait a bit before issuing a final recommendation. If you cannot wait a few weeks to see how Linux support shakes out (and if issues are addressed reasonably quickly or there are other issues), then you probably should generally buy an older more well-supported card anyway.  

Final Thoughts  

The Radeon RX 5700 XT is basically slightly better than a high-end RTX 2070, and the Radeon TX 5700 is slightly worse, but costs less.  

Even with Nvidia launching "Super" editions of their cards, it's not enough to make up the price/performance delta. AMD is clearly the better deal here (at this performance level). Of course Nvidia does have faster cards, though at a higher cost.  

Combined with the differentiating software features, and especially the media encoders for content creators, the savvy gamer would be well-advised to look at the performance and features offered by AMD when considering their next 1440p/high-framerate-capable graphics card upgrade. There are some compelling features here and this is just the first iteration of a very promising new architecture.  

Here's to hoping that AMD's RDNA is the "Zen 1.0" of AMD's GPU division – a great first iteration that lays the groundwork for something that changes the industry.