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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bananaforscale - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
I expected to be buying a 2070 Super next, but now I'm absolutely waiting for third party cards on both sides. Didn't expect 5700XT to have a lower power draw than 2070S under full load either.Skiddywinks - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
It's the slightly slower than a 2070S but 20% better perf/cost that's got me.Will have to see how those numbers stack up with the third party cards. But the XT is looking better than I expected.
Kevin G - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Given the pricing structure, AMD as initially targeting the RTX 2070 performance for the RX 5700 and the result point to a victory in that comparison. The gotcha is that nVidia went Super and AMD has pre-emtpively dropped prices. The result is that what was the performance at $599 nine months ago from nVidia can now be hand for $399 from AMD. Street pricing over time should be more interesting as AMD has more room to move downward while boosting performance over time with some driver updates. Due to the restructuring of nVidia's line up, the RX 5700XT isn't a clear win but certainly not a wrong choice to make.Huh, I wonder what feature set AMD has for HDMI for it not work at boot on your workbench. Makes me wonder what would happen with this card in a 2010 Mac Pro which exhibits similar display oddities with 3rd party GPUs at boot.
Drivers do need some polish looking at the benchmark data. Strange Brigade's 99th percentile numbers are very similar at 1440p and 1080p where the averages are more divergent. Chances are that there is a hiccup there that might be able to be flattened out. Similarly the synthetic numbers are troublesome and point to a driver issue: the buffer compression figures indicate, well, that there is buffer compression going on. Vega on the other hand has a small amount going on which helps. I'd be really curious if compression data from real games can be extracted to fully isolate it to drivers. Also how well do Vulkan games run? I know it isn't part of the normal test bench any cursory data on this API support with the launch drivers?
imaheadcase - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
AMD has never been known for good drivers, or slow to fix stuff. I doubt they have more room to move downward, they pretty much knew the pricing of cards at release and made it seem like it price drop.For a brand new "cheap" pc build these be ok cards, but if already got a decent nvidia gpu no reason at all to upgrade to it, considering the time it takes AMD to catch up in hardware, they always fall back behind for years.
just4U - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Wait... what? I am sitting on last gen 1080s(sli) and Vega's(cf) and while I don't see any card out there I want besides the Vega VII currently.. to suggest these would only be good in a "cheap" build is nonsense.mapesdhs - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
imaheadcase, you're out of date re drivers, AMD has more reliable drivers these days, and (it seems) generally better image quality, hence why Google chose AMD over NVIDIA for Stadia. There's always an exception of course, Radeon VII's launch drivers were awful, that card was launched two weeks too early.haukionkannel - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
True... AMD drivers have been better than Nvidia drivers for a some time and that is small miracle considering how big programming team Nvidia has... wonder what They have been doing lately? Optimising RT performance?tamalero - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
The usual, gaining exclusives by optimizing the games FOR their hardware first.zodiacfml - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
I guess the choice of games matter.Korguz - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
yep.. and i dont play any of the games tested.. so.. to attempt to choose a new vid card.. will be interesting....