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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mapesdhs - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Check out Hardware Unboxed and (when it's up) Gamers Nexus for Navi reviews, they're likely to have a different selection of games.fizzypop1 - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
There is a 5 % performance gap between the 5070-XT and the 2070 super I am thinking the anniversary edition may be able to catch the 2070super and at a lower price may be worth considering. Other reviews are saying they have driver issues so there may be more performance to be had.GreenMeters - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Wow, AMD has really done it on both CPU and GPU fronts. Looks like next system will be 3700X + RX 5700, Linux only, open source drivers. Only catch is the need to wait for 3rd party GPU cooler, just for quieter operation.rolfaalto - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Would be interesting to run tests using the new AMD CPUs ... taking full advantage of PCIe-4!Kevin G - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
I was hoping for a last minute surprise that when paired together the link between a RX 5700 and Ryzen 3000 series chip would negotiate to an Infinity Fabric link with even more bandwidth and more importantly memory coherency. This would be more of an efficiency play than shifting peak performance higher. Compute work loads should love this arrangement.mapesdhs - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
There will be no benefit for games with PCIe 4.0 and current Navi products. Maybe Navi 20 at 8K, but not at the moment. Benefits from 4.0 are far more related to storage just now, which for most users again is largely irrelevant.rahvin - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
Storage speed is never a non-factor. It affects everything you do. Sure it's not like going from HD to SSD but any increase in speed of the disk system has an impact because it's the slowest part of the whole computer.msroadkill612 - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
We are a rare breed Sir. I very much agree but it is heresy to say it out loud. Its not just raw speed either - even the lag & processing overhead of chipset sata ssd vs native pcie nvme is significant, especially on an underpowered rig like an APU.ballsystemlord - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Thanks for your hard work ryan. I'll read this after you flesh it out a bit as its sparsity makes checking it for typos rather pointless.I look forward to your post on the compute benchmarks in the coming weeks (months?).
ballsystemlord - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
@ryan , what's the die size?