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.
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WaltC - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
All FIXED--had to come back and correct the record. I used the "clean" install method from the 19.6.3's--and all is well so far with the 19.7.1's, I am delighted to say...;) Couldn't leave it hanging like that. I should have done that the first time, because it is a new driver set of greater size and feature support (for the 5700's)--yes, mea culpa! How many times is it the last thing I try that *works*? (utterly rhetorical)...Arrghghghg! Only thing out of the ordinary I saw were some funky desktop colors that vanished with the initial reboot after installation--running fine now!WaltC - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Drivers need, it would seem.ksec - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Thanks. It is good enough for me as it is. Technical Details could be another article. But the Number of Performance, Price in Percentage does the job.IGTrading - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Thank you for the good work Ryan and thank you for not awarding some ridiculous silver "award" to Radeon of your colleagues did with Ryzen 3000 :)Ryan Smith - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
So it's noted, I'm the one that suggested the Silver award. I'm as equally culpable for that as I am the lack of an award here.jospoortvliet - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
Fwiw both decisions were prudent if you ask me. Ryzen 3 changed the the entire direction CPU performance was taking - for over half a decade we had incremental improvements at best. Now the triplet price/performance/power is completely upended by the new generarion zen. While the new radeons are interesting they are nowhere near as market-moving...jakky567 - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Does it have VP9 10 bit? I know Raven Ridge does. It's nice for YouTube hdr.Ryan Smith - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
Yes.crashtech - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
Well, the Compute portion is still bare-bones. Do these cards just not run on the omitted applications?alfatekpt - Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - link
Why no 1660 TI included in this benchmark?