The AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT Review, Feat. Sapphire Pulse: A New Challenger For Mainstream Gaming
by Ryan Smith on January 21, 2020 9:01 AM ESTSynthetics
Moving on, we have our synthetic performance testing, taking a look at geometry throughput, pixel throughput, memory compression, and more.
Given the significance of cutting a quarter of Navi 10’s GDDR6 memory bus, I was very curious to see what that would do for synthetic performance. But for better or worse, this has created more questions than it has solved.
The numbers listed below are accurate, in as much as these are the results I get when testing these cards. Whether they are correct, however, is another matter.
The problem, in short, is that due to AMD’s very aggressive power savings/idling implementation for their Navi 10 cards, I have been unable to get these cards to run at their full memory clockspeeds when executing the the Beyond3D Suite benchmark suite. The GPU clocks regularly pass 1600MHz like they should, however AMD’s telemetry is reporting that memory clocks are rarely hitting 7Gbps, let alone 12Gbps+. As a result, we end up with results like the pixel test below, where the RX 5600 XT is beating the RX 5700, an otherwise impossible outcome.
As best as I can tell, this issue has been going on since the launch of the Radeon RX 5700 series back in July, but it’s only now that I’ve noticed it, in large part due to the RX 5600 XT cards being slightly less aggressive in their idling. In other words, those cards are boosting to higher memory clockspeeds more often, putting them ahead of the RX 5700 and bringing the clocking issue front and center.
I’m still working on a proper fix for the issue, but for now the results with Navi 10 cards should be taken with a large grain of salt. The benchmark itself is still fine, but AMD’s aggressive power management (and lack of an easy means to disable it) is kneecapping AMD’s performance in these benchmarks.
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Korguz - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
maybe because there is no official ko edition ?? maybe its just something evga released for product naming only ?? 2060S maybe cause there was no point to enclude it in the charts ? you could always use ATs bench comparison...philosofool - Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - link
Probably because it’s a totally different price tier. They also didn’t include AMD offerings in that tier.BG19902 - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
There's an error in the conclusion:"memory overclock in particular giving RX 5660 XT a several percent boost in performance". I believe that should be "5600 XT"
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Right you are. Thanks!Hrel - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
I think its interesting how little performance is actually gained beyond the 1650 Super. This is only 10% faster... Roughly. Going from 150 bucks, to 300 gets you 10-20% better fps? What a ripoff!This article makes an argument for the 1660 Super Better Than Anything Else, but even that's an extra $70 for what amounts to an extra 5-10fps? So, never gonna be the difference between playable and unplayable for 70 bucks!?
Idk what's going on with GPUs, going higher end has always been a bad value but now its just dumb.
It really is like everything has been reduced to xbone graphics so as long as your next card exceed ps5 performance you're good for 10+ years!
Retycint - Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - link
1650 super is roughly equivalent to the 580, so the 5600XT is a lot more than "5-10% faster"Samus - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
So the 2060 is basically irrelevant now. It was always too slow for ray tracing, and now it's outclassed for a cheaper, faster card.Kurosaki - Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - link
The 5950xt could not come sooner. We don't need another 590-league cardTheWereCat - Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - link
Maybe I've read different review than you did but how is 5600XT a 590 performer?misterragequit - Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - link
Any way we could get some rendering comparisons in the Compute sections of these GPU reviews? Considering that GPU renderers with the OptiX backend are taking full use of the RT cores in Nvidia GPUs, I'd be interested to see how these Navi cards hold up. A simple comparison in Blender using the Cycles renderer would be great.