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 ESTCompute
Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier in my testing observations, the state of AMD's OpenCL driver stack at launch is quite poor. 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.
That said, it also serves to highlight the current state of OpenCL overall. In short, OpenCL doesn't have any good champions right now. Creator Apple is now well entrenched in its own proprietary Metal ecosystem, NVIDIA favors CUDA for obvious reasons, and even AMD's GPU compute efforts are more focused on the Linux-exclusive ROCm platform, since this is what drives their Radeon Instinct sales. As a result, the overall state of GPU computing on the Windows desktop is in a precarious place, and at this rate I wouldn't be entirely surprised if future development is centered around compute shaders instead.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
135 Comments
View All Comments
CiccioB - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
The difference in gain is not 13%. dB are not linear but logarithmic.Each 3 dB means that the noise doubles, so 61.9 - 54.5 is a difference of 7.5db, meaning that the loudest measure is about 6 times more loud that the quieter one.
I don't know about the discrepancy in the measurements, but it is quite big to not need a deeper look by the reviewer reporting those numbers.
Silma - Thursday, July 11, 2019 - link
Too bad, I would have been interested in the RX 5700 XT but it's way too noisy.CiccioB - Friday, July 12, 2019 - link
Wait for the custom version. In a couple of months. Probably.tomc100 - Friday, July 12, 2019 - link
I'll probably wait for the water cooled version since this card is too hot and a fan will just make my room 80 degrees fahrenheit within 30 minutes. Sick of all the price gouging from Nvidia and the fact that they release a super before AMD's launch proves it. Despicable company.MDD1963 - Saturday, July 13, 2019 - link
Nice review; I think the 5700Xt stacks up against the 2060 Super and 2070 Super quite nicely.....; Hell, I'd hit it if I could! :)coolrock2008 - Saturday, July 13, 2019 - link
The cards were tested on an Intel CPU platform and i understand why. But, I was just wondering if the PCIe 4 switch brought any benefit at all to the cards? Any specific workload/benchmark that can benefit from the increased bandwidth? What are your thoughts on it @Ryan ?Mason1232 - Saturday, July 27, 2019 - link
Aimed at what these days is the midrange segment of the video card market, AMD is looking to carve out a new place for the companyballsystemlord - Saturday, July 27, 2019 - link
I love coffee, I love tea, I love Ryan's article on Navi! (Even though it's not finished yet...)viivo - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
The 5700s losing in all the Vulkan benchmarks is making me consider hitting that "cancel order" button and go with a 2060/70 Super. AMD should never perform worse in Vulkan against supposedly equally powered competition.cvearl - Tuesday, September 10, 2019 - link
I ahve the XFX 5700 non XT model. Refence cooler. It was less so noise that was the issue but more the revving of the fan. It was never sure on a speed to settle at. So I went into Wattman and locked the fanspeed to 30% (~1700 RPM) for anything above 50C across the board. Clocks hover between 1650 - 1700 MHz during long gaming sessions. Temp wise it settles in at about 85C and is a bit quieter than my old RX580 ASUS Rog Strix OC model. I wish they just shipped it like than rather than leave me to tweak it myself.