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
maroon1 you keep pusing RT as the reason to get the 2060 over the 5600xt.. but do you even realize the performance hit you would suffer for using it ?? face it.. RT on this card.. is not a feature or rt future proof.. according to this review.. seems the 5600xt.. is rhe better cardsonny73n - Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - link
Forget ray tracing. RTX2060 is still a better card.Spunjji - Thursday, January 23, 2020 - link
"Forget the biggest reason I gave for this card being better... it's better anyway because reasons"-slow claps as the goalposts disappear over the horizon-
Duckferd - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
I think the factory overclocked Sapphire card is a very interesting option. DLSS and VRS have AMD equivalents that work very well (and Sapphire has its Trixx software), meaning the only thing that Nvidia has over it in the RTX 2060 is ray tracing and NVENC- NVENC being more consequential considering the performance loss from ray tracing. This is a very competitive offering.335 GT - Friday, January 31, 2020 - link
DLSS is like smearing vaseline over your lens. Great feature for internet trolls though.Irata - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Care to elaborate on those features ? Ray tracing I get, although on the 2060 that's mostly a theoretical feature, but the rest...Or in short: What can those features do where the RX 5600 doesn't not have a similar feature under a different name that does the same thing ?
eva02langley - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
It does actually.https://youtu.be/qcAwR49zRCg?t=919
alufan - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
have to be honest I bought a 2080 when they first came out and frankly I should have just gone with a 1080 or the equiv navi 64 etc the whole RTX thing is pointless hardly any games have it and the performance hit makes it something I can live without, maybe in a couple of gens it will work but right now nah I will save money and buy other stuffschujj07 - Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - link
Except for the fact that in 6 of 9 titles the card reviewed here is FASTER than the 2060 while costing less. At Tomshardware they have the 5600XT faster in 8 of 11 at 1080p and 9 of 11 at 1440p. That means that the 2060 has worse performance per dollar than the 5600XT.Spunjji - Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - link
"Hur hur, I like paying too much for graphics cards"Thanks troll