AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT Review: Mid-range Madness

AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT detailed evaluation

AMD lastly unveiled their Navi-based graphics playing cards at COMPUTEX 2019 earlier this 12 months to a lot pleasure for avid gamers worldwide. It had been some time since AMD had a correct graphics card within the high-end section. The Radeon Vega 64 and Vega 56, adopted by the Radeon VII that was introduced at CES 2019, had all been good makes an attempt at grabbing the GPU crown from NVIDIA however AMD’s latest GPU launches have all fallen brief. Nonetheless, AMD has been the favorite relating to offering avid gamers worth for his or her hard-earned cash. NVIDIA’s pricing has at all times been approach increased as a result of that’s what manufacturers do when there is no such thing as a competitors. AMD’s continued makes an attempt at offering a high-end graphics playing cards have helped preserve NVIDIA’s high-pricing in examine. That development has continued with these new playing cards as properly, as you’ll see afterward.

That mentioned, NVIDIA nonetheless has the benefit due to the hardware-accelerated real-time ray-tracing capabilities, a function that continues to see little adoption. At E3 this 12 months, a number of main sport builders and publishers, and even console producers introduced that their subsequent titles would begin incorporating ray-tracing. Cyberpunk 2077 is the largest of the lot. The important thing distinction right here is that each one graphics playing cards can carry out ray-tracing, NVIDIA RTX playing cards have devoted {hardware} components to carry out ray-tracing whereas the remainder of the GPUs use their regular shaders to do the identical. Primarily, it’s a bonus that hardly ever is ever used.

Coming to the Radeon RX 5700 XT and RX 5700, these playing cards function AMD’s new RDNA structure. A design that’s primarily GCN with some components of RDNA. Consider Navi as an augmented model of GCN which takes the perfect of GCN and compensates for its shortcomings with new Compute Items (CU), improved graphics pipeline and a multi-level cache hierarchy. We are able to take a more in-depth take a look at the specs beneath.

AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT / 5700 Specs

We’re not wanting on the Radeon VII however the two Vega playing cards proper earlier than it — Radeon RX Vega 64 and Vega 56. Having moved to a 7nm manufacturing course of, Navi permits for increased clocks whereas saving energy as properly. Because of the smaller transistors, we are able to additionally see that with the Navi 10 GPU, AMD has managed to squeeze 10.3 billion transistors onto a die that’s roughly half the dimensions of the Vega 10 GPUs. The Compute Items nonetheless function the identical variety of Stream Processors i.e. 64 however there have been different enhancements by way of a further scheduler which permits it to queue much more directions and there’s a further scalar unit as properly which helps with growing math efficiency. 

The development with the clock speeds are fairly appreciable. The height enhance now goes all the way in which as much as 1905 MHz with the entire board energy scaling as much as 225W as per the specs. If there had been extra CUs, then we’d have seen clock speeds nearer however higher than the Vega 10 primarily based GPUs. The opposite main change occurs to be the reminiscence sort which is now GDDR6 as a substitute of HBM2. GDDR6 is approach cheaper than HBM2 and has lowered bandwidth per chip, so it’s a must to use extra chips to get the identical bandwidth however the general price financial savings make it simpler for AMD to cost the playing cards higher. The upper bandwidth of HBM2 is helpful in only a few situations corresponding to tremendous high-resolution gaming, AI workloads involving huge datasets, and many others. We used the phrase tremendous to qualify a a lot increased decision than the present 1440p and 2160p resolutions which are more and more turning into frequent with avid gamers. The present development is to go for excessive refresh-rate displays with resolutions across the 1080p-1440p mark since good 4K excessive refresh-rate displays are nonetheless costly right here.

Efficiency

Our take a look at rig has been upgraded to maintain up with the instances and the brand new Home windows releases. This implies all our legacy scores usually are not comparable, particularly given the truth that CPU efficiency has gone up by a major margin. Right here’s what we’re operating in the mean time. 

Processor – Intel Core i9 9900K

CPU Cooler – Corsair H115i RGB PLATINUM

Motherboard – ASUS ROG MAXIMUS X HERO

RAM – 2x 8 GB G.Talent Trident Z Royal 3600 MHz

SSD – AORUS NVMe Gen4 SSD

PSU – Corsair HX1050

Graphics playing cards:

AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT

AMD Radeon RX 5700

AMD Radeon VII

NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti

NVIDIA RTX 2080

NVIDIA RTX 2070

NVIDIA RTX 2060

AMD Radeon RX 590 (Legacy Scores)

AMD Radeon Vega 64 (Legacy Scores)

Please word, the scores for the Vega 64 and RX 590 usually are not freshly examined however older scores obtained once we had acquired the graphics playing cards. The remainder have been re-tested since we have now these playing cards with us.

3D Mark

We begin with the artificial benchmarks inside 3D Mark to see how the brand new Radeon RX 5700 XT and 5700 fare towards the opposite playing cards out there. 

We are able to see that the Radeon VII continues to be higher than each new playing cards however not by an unlimited margin. The Radeon VII launched at $699 whereas the RX 5700 XT prices $399 and the RX 5700 prices $349. So for the brand new playing cards to return this shut at a a lot cheaper price level exhibits how way more environment friendly and performant the brand new Navi structure is. 

Even in Time Spy and Time Spy Excessive, we see the same sample however the Radeon VII has barely decrease scores in Time Spy whereas within the Excessive preset it scores higher. In comparison with the competitors, the Radeon RX 5700 XT continues to be higher than the NVIDIA RTX 2070 and the RX 5700 scores decrease than the 2070.

Gaming

Shifting on to our sport benchmarks, we get to see a real-world illustration of how these new graphics playing cards carry out in comparison with the competitors. 

In Battlefield V, the RX 5700 XT did higher than even the RTX 2080 throughout all examined resolutions which felt like a little bit of an anomaly. Even the marginally older Radeon VII carried out higher than many of the playing cards within the take a look at besides at 4K decision. However, the RX 5700 carried out higher than the Vega 64, RTX 2060 and even the older RX 590.

It appears the great people over at Ubisoft haven’t made a lot of an enchancment with the sport engine between Far Cry 5 and Far Cry New Daybreak. We discovered each benchmarks to observe the identical curve. Far Cry New Daybreak’s scores have been properly throughout the margin of error for even run. Right here we see a development that appears extra consistent with many of the benchmarks we ran. The RX 5700 XT carried out higher than the RTX 2070 and even the older Vega 64. The RX 5700 equalled the RTX 2070 at 4K decision however the variations grew to become extra obvious at decrease resolutions because the RTX 2070 creeped forward. Even right here, we see the RX 5700 coming forward of the RTX 2060. 

Shadow of the Tomb Raider sees the identical curve but once more however this time, the RX 5700 XT is forward of the RTX 2070 throughout all resolutions. The identical goes for the RX 5700 in comparison towards the RTX 2060.

The Witcher 3 was the one sport whereby we noticed the RTX 2070 carry out higher than the RX 5700 XT with the most recent driver replace. The RX 5700 XT did carry out higher with the earlier driver that was initially seeded through the evaluation course of. Solely at decrease resolutions did the RX 5700 XT get the higher of the RTX 2070. The identical may be mentioned of the RX 5700 and the RTX 2060.

Overclocking

We solely had a number of hours to overclock the RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 as a result of the primary set of drivers supplied had points if any of the ability and frequency settings have been tweaked. So we’d have one other go at getting barely higher scores than what we have now so far. We tried the Auto OC settings inside WattMan and we tried messing round with the OC manually to extract no matter we might. Listed here are the outcomes for the 5700 XT whereas we proceed to work on the 5700:

Individually, the GPU clock and the Mem clock have been bumped as much as discover out their peak values. The bottom clock might go all the way in which as much as 2130 MHz whereas the reminiscence might go up until 935 MHz with out crashing the OS or failing the benchmark. With each parameters set to their particular person peak values we couldn’t get a correct run and there could be a crash each single time we tried. We then tried reducing the bottom clock all the way in which all the way down to 1950 MHz however the benchmark would nonetheless crash. So we set the bottom clock to 2100 after which began reducing the reminiscence clock. At 930 MHz reminiscence clock, the OS had stopped crashing however the benchmark was nonetheless failing in direction of the third or 4th leg. So after having dropped the reminiscence clock to 925 MHz, we lastly ended up with the primary profitable run of Time Spy with a rating of 9598. In comparison with the best rating we’ve obtained so far at inventory clocks, which is 9193, this OC try bought us a 4.41% enchancment in efficiency. We nonetheless have some extra experimenting to do with the bottom clocks and the board energy to see if we are able to get extra artificial and gaming efficiency.

Pricing

The AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT is priced at Rs.30,990 + Taxes and the RX 5700 is priced at Rs.26990 + Taxes. With 18% GST, that works out to be Rs.36,568 for the Radeon RX 5700 XT and Rs.31,848 for the RX 5700. For the NVIDIA playing cards we picked the official costs from the NVIDIA web site and wherever we couldn’t discover any official pricing, we picked the bottom priced companion card. An mixture benchmark rating was used to determine the worth for cash issue for all of the playing cards. 

This calculation is completed with out contemplating the sport bundles that each firms present with their companion playing cards. NVIDIA’s providing Wolfenstein: Youngblood which retails for Rs.1,999 on Steam and AMD is providing the XBOX Recreation Cross (PC) for 3 months which might price about Rs.1024 for that point interval. If we’re to match the 2 affords, then the Xbox Recreation Cross supplied by AMD provides you entry to 113 titles together with Metro Exodus and a number of other different AAA titles with extra to be added each month. NVIDIA’s Recreation Bundle simply provides you one sport.

Conserving the provide apart, all these playing cards present greater than 60 FPS at 1440p decision. So all of the playing cards listed here are greater than able to operating the most recent AAA titles with out fear. The two-year-old Vega 64 leads the pack adopted by the Navi-based RX 5700 XT and RX 5700. We additionally wished to incorporate the older gen Pascal playing cards — GTX 1080 Ti, GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 Ti — however they’re all out of inventory whereas the ASUS branded Vega 64 are nonetheless in inventory throughout a number of cities. With the efficiency of the RX 5700 XT being higher than the RTX 2070 in most of our benchmarks, the AMD card is clearly the higher alternative. Nonetheless, in case you are undecided between the RX 5700 and the RTX 2060, then the RX 5700 not solely scores excessive by way of efficiency but additionally higher priced. General, the AMD RX 5700 XT and the AMD RX 5700 displace the RTX 2070 and the RTX 2060 from the candy spot. The one purpose you’d go along with the NVIDIA playing cards could be to avail hardware-accelerated real-time ray-tracing which barely any video games have correctly included. 

NVIDIA’s latest Tremendous launch was aimed toward guaranteeing that NVIDIA retains the mid-range, nonetheless, a last-minute worth drop by AMD has foiled NVIDIA’s plans. Whether or not your entire last-minute worth drop was deliberate from the very starting is one thing we’ll by no means know but it surely definitely appears to have miffed NVIDIA.

About Me: Whereas not allotting deadly doses of sarcasm, this curious creature can usually be discovered tinkering with tech, taking part in ‘vidya’ video games or exploring the darkest corners of the Internets. #PCMasterRace
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