AMD Announces Radeon RX 5700 XT & RX 5700: The Next Gen of AMD Video Cards Starts on July 7th At $449/$379
by Ryan Smith on June 10, 2019 7:20 PM ESTA Quick Note on Architecture & Features
With pages upon pages of architectural documents still to get through in only a few hours, for today’s launch news I’m not going to have the time to go in depth on new features or the architecture. So I want to very briefly hit the high points on what the major features are, and also provide some answers to what are likely to be some common questions.
Starting with the architecture itself, one of the biggest changes for RDNA is the width of a wavefront, the fundamental group of work. GCN in all of its iterations was 64 threads wide, meaning 64 threads were bundled together into a single wavefront for execution. RDNA drops this to a native 32 threads wide. At the same time, AMD has expanded the width of their SIMDs from 16 slots to 32 (aka SIMD32), meaning the size of a wavefront now matches the SIMD size. This is one of AMD’s key architectural efficiency changes, as it helps them keep their SIMD slots occupied more often. It also means that a wavefront can be passed through the SIMDs in a single cycle, instead of over 4 cycles on GCN parts.
In terms of compute, there are not any notable feature changes here as far as gaming is concerned. How things work under the hood has changed dramatically at points, but from the perspective of a programmer, there aren’t really any new math operations here that are going to turn things on their head. RDNA of course supports Rapid Packed Math (Fast FP16), so programmers who make use of FP16 will get to enjoy those performance benefits.
With a single exception, there also aren’t any new graphics features. Navi does not include any hardware ray tracing support, nor does it support variable rate pixel shading. AMD is aware of the demands for these, and hardware support for ray tracing is in their roadmap for RDNA 2 (the architecture formally known as “Next Gen”). But none of that is present here.
The one exception to all of this is the primitive shader. Vega’s most infamous feature is back, and better still it’s enabled this time. The primitive shader is compiler controlled, and thanks to some hardware changes to make it more useful, it now makes sense for AMD to turn it on for gaming. Vega’s primitive shader, though fully hardware functional, was difficult to get a real-world performance boost from, and as a result AMD never exposed it on Vega.
Unique in consumer parts for the new 5700 series cards is support for PCI Express 4.0. Designed to go hand-in-hand with AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series CPUs, which are introducing support for the feature as well, PCIe 4.0 doubles the amount of bus bandwidth available to the card, rising from ~16GB/sec to ~32GB/sec. The real world performance implications of this are limited at this time, especially for a card in the 5700 series’ performance segment. But there are situations where it will be useful, particularly on the content creation side of matters.
Finally, AMD has partially updated their display controller. I say “partially” because while it’s technically an update, they aren’t bringing much new to the table. Notably, HDMI 2.1 support isn’t present – nor is more limited support for HDMI 2.1 Variable Rate Refresh. Instead, AMD’s display controller is a lot like Vega’s: DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0b, including support for AMD’s proprietary Freesync-over-HDMI standard. So AMD does have variable rate capabilities for TVs, but it isn’t the HDMI standard’s own implementation.
The one notable change here is support for DisplayPort 1.4 Display Stream Compression. DSC, as implied by the name, compresses the image going out to the monitor to reduce the amount of bandwidth needed. This is important going forward for 4K@144Hz displays, as DP1.4 itself doesn’t provide enough bandwidth for them (leading to other workarounds such as NVIDIA’s 4:2:2 chroma subsampling on G-Sync HDR monitors). This is a feature we’ve talked off and on about for a while, and it’s taken some time for the tech to really get standardized and brought to a point where it’s viable in a consumer product.
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catavalon21 - Friday, July 5, 2019 - link
+1Korguz - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link
heh.. look on some of the posts for the articles, there are a few intel fanboys that may be worse...Lord of the Bored - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link
All the fanboys are terrible.FreckledTrout - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link
+1 Anyone who follows a product like It’s a religion is delusional on some level.peevee - Wednesday, June 12, 2019 - link
Anyone who follows anything like a religion, including any religion, is delusional...WinterCharm - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link
They're not as bad as the smartphone crew. Apple and Samsung Fanboys drive me up the wall with their bullshit.evernessince - Wednesday, June 12, 2019 - link
How about you try something positive instead of putting other's down.Tewt - Monday, June 17, 2019 - link
Let's look at comments before and many after V900's statement and wonder WTH he is talking about.I also have to wonder about the mentality of someone that comes into an AMD article and expects the commenters to praise Intel or Nvidia.
sircod - Monday, June 10, 2019 - link
Did they specify that it did not have HDMI 2.1 support? That is one thing I am really waiting for.sircod - Monday, June 10, 2019 - link
Just noticed page 2. HDMI 2.0b and Freesync-over-HDMI, but no 2.1. I really want that increased bandwidth for 4k 120Hz with VRR. Guess I will keep waiting.