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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maroon1 - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
It does not beat RTX 2060 (after price drop) in performance per dollar while having less features. 5600XT does not sound like great value. 5500XT 8GB is even worseQasar - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
but if one puts no value in those features, then what?? i dont consider RT value feature, as i wont use it, i dont play any games that use it, so why waste the money on it ( for now ) as was said in another reply, unless you get a higher end 2070 or better, the performance hit for it, makes it almost unusablesing_electric - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Especially since the 2060 is BARELY capable of RTX stuff with current-gen titles. By the time the 1st titles developed with accelerated ray tracing in mind - rather than an "add on" after a lot of the art was made and the engine was written - come out (next year?), there's a good chance the 2060 will be too slow to enable rays anyways.neblogai - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
As per Hardware Unboxed review- 5600XT offers the same speed as 2060, but costs less and uses less power.maroon1 - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
RTX 2060 matches 5600XT in performance per dollar without any of these features. SO even if these "extra" features are useless, 5600XT does not have any advantage anyway.I rather have RT for safety as some games in future might become RT only since next gen consoles are going RT.
DLSS runs very on wolfenstein youngblood (check digital foundary about it)
ALso, it support variable rate shading which is also supported by next gen console (at least xbox series x confirmed to use it)
Cooe - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
"as some games in future might become RT only". And that's what where I realized that you have absolutely no freaking clue what in the hell you are talking about.Xyler94 - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Do you understand how computationally demanding drawing an entire scene in Ray Tracing would be?Every game today that has Ray Tracing uses it only for shadows or reflections, because anything else it would hurt performance too much. RT is amazing, and I love it... but when some of the best computer hardware takes a few days to render an image completely in RT, I don't think an RTX2060 would stand any chance at rendering an image in full RT in a second, let alone render 60 images in a second...
Remember, games needed to cut down on the amount of Rays and bounces just to get acceptable RT performance. Rendering everything in RT would require a ton of bounces to get a better image than traditional rasterization... and it's the bouncing that makes RT so computational taxing. I refer to it as bouncing, because the rays bounce off objects to create realistic shadows, lighting, and textures on objects. The more rays, and bounces you have before it goes to the "eye", the better the image is gonna look.
TL;DR: Don't hold your breath. By the time games can be fully rendered in RT, I'm guessing we'll be on the 4th or 5th generation of RT Cards from both Nvidia and AMD...
BenSkywalker - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Metro Exodus uses ray tracing for global illumination and Q2RTX uses ray tracing for GI, shadows and reflections, both playable on a 2060. I've played through those games with ray tracing on a 2060 without issue, people say Control is also, but don't have first hand experience with that(and not sure exactly what rt is used for).There are hardly any games is valid, but there are games and they are quite playable on a 2060 using ray tracing today.
Droekath - Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - link
Ray tracing on the 2060 is rather pointless, unless you want to play games at sub-30 fps on most modern titles at 1080p. If you really want to apply ray tracing, then it's advisable to get at least a 2070 or higher.maroon1 - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
According to Hardware Unboxed 2060 is slightly faster. And it offer comparable performance per dollar (if 2060 is 299 dollar)