oh right sorry it's been a long couple of weeks
first AMD announced their new Radeon and verizon products were released yesterday
and then NVIDIA decided they were going to announce super on the second and
well let's just say i've been putting in some extra hours
but it was well worth it the new Radeon rx 5700 series is nearly as interesting
as the new 3rd gen ryzen processors a ridge wallet is a sleek way to keep
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first the cards themselves we've got three skus available at launch the
mid-range rx 5700 is positioned to compete directly against team green's
rtx 2060 while the higher end rx 5700 xt
with four extra compute units was being pitted against the rtx 2070 but now that
card is out of the picture so the real rival there ends up being the rtx 2060
super finally there is a limited edition 50th
anniversary rx 5700 xt with a gold trimmed shroud and an 80 megahertz clock
boost for an extra 50 personally i'd buy an extra game but
everyone has different priorities powering the rx 5700 series is a new
seven nanometer core design AMD is calling rdna
compared to the previous generation gcn based cards like vega our dna features
native pci express 4.0 support along with gddr6 as standard not hbm2 as a
result of the latter point availability should improve over vega and the
financial break-even point for emd should be far lower giving them more
mobility in terms of pricing an important point we'll get to later on
for now i want to nerd out a little bit the new compute units are core to the
performance and efficiency gains AMD claims with the rx 5700 series
and ultimately may be a point of contention for AMD fans because of what
it implies about the AMD fine wine technology
see a GPU typically does its work in batches to make a long story short each
of AMD's older gcn compute units can work on up to four batches at a time and
wouldn't you know it each batch is sized to be evenly divisible by four thanks to
the magic of parallel processing that means it can complete one batch per
cycle if four cues are active simultaneously which is where AMD's
traditional strength in compute comes from the problem with this approach
comes about when there's fewer than four batches to work on simultaneously which
frequently occurs in games as processing demands rise and fall depending on
what's on the screen so if you end up having one batch getting processed at a
time it could take up to four times longer to complete than it otherwise
would and even worse it's not because the GPU is overworked but rather because
there's so much of it sitting idle optimizing games and drivers to help
prevent this is somewhat complex and also where many of those fine wine
improvements come from our dna compute units on the other hand use two cues
each capable of handling batches at twice the rate of gcn in a single cycle
which means each compute unit in the new architecture can handle the same amount
of work as before but with only half the potential for performance loss in an
unoptimized scenario all while being easier to optimize for AMD capitalized
on this new design by combining it with a few other tweaks that help smooth out
the rough edges which altogether makes for a far more streamlined and optimized
rendering engine for games with the obvious downside for AMD fans being that
fine wine as we know it may be a thing of the past along with the hardware
AMD's launching a host of new features some of which are novel and while others
are well let's get into it Radeon's multimedia capabilities got a
substantial boost this generation with support for the new visually lossless
display stream compression technique that enables the new cards to output up
to 8k60 off of a singles connector with
no chroma subsampling that's pretty sick
less cool sick and more sick is the new Radeon media engine that
combines encoding and decoding into one place on paper you've got the ingredients for
a really versatile card but our test
recordings were disappointing at the same CPU usage and bitrate nvenk
completely wipes the floor with it with many of the smaller details of our
recording just completely getting lost on AMD
ouch perhaps the most interesting of the new
features is what AMD is calling anti-lag
it's a little difficult to explain exactly the tl dr is that you can think
of it kind of like a v-sync for your CPU
but unlike vsync it actually lowers input lag
it achieves this by having the CPU only tell the GPU to work on frames as soon
as they're needed meaning that while frame rates might drop by a few
percentage points with it on the time taken to display each frame
and thus the input lag is reduced Linus
is caught the high speed camera bug so let us know in the comments if you want
to see this put to the test and i'll pass the feedback along i'm sure he'll
be down for any excuse to play with the fandom again finally there's the feature
that's interesting for all the wrong reasons the new open source fidelity fx
framework you can think of this a bit like graphics tweaking packages like reshade
or sweet effects but virtually for free
contrast adaptive sharpening is what AMD chose to show off for now and
really i could take or leave it some things look decent like the road in
motion example in f1 2019 but others look really tacky like their borderlands
example the good news is that it comes without a performance penalty so if you do like it
you can toggle it on for all dx9 12 and vulcan titles via the Radeon image
sharpening feature bringing us finally to benchmarks
since i've been on such a time crunch for this release i'm reusing the GPU
bench i built up for the NVIDIA super video which thankfully means i can also
reuse some of those numbers that's the one benefit to product
launches this close together there's no time for driver updates
AMD's off to a good start in gaming though the rx 5700's performance has it
competing well against even the rtx 2060 super and at times its bigger brother rx
5700 xt overtakes even the far more expensive rtx 2070 super
titles with hair works like metro exodus gave us lower performance on Radeon but
the new lineup still remained competitive against its direct competitors typically sitting above
their overall performance levels not a great look for NVIDIA right now
considering super was supposed to be a giant middle finger to AMD as for
productivity AMD is still strong but a
bit more of a mixed bag than usual for instance for longer renders in
blender both new cards beat out the rtx 2070
but then in shorter ones both of them lost even to the non-super rtx 2060.
we thought that was pretty weird sort of interrupt future Anthony here you might
have noticed something strange about this blender result look
at the 2070 super it's way out of line
well i re-ran it a bunch of times on all the cards and even though the 2070 super
isn't that far ahead of the 2070 and other tests here we are
still investigating this one okay on to the video then luxmark has team red and
team green trading blows again depending on the workload
both AMD cards steal the show in catia and solidworks even from the rtx 2070
super and as for the rest of spec view perf we've got another mishmash of wins
and losses for team red and team green with the deltas being high enough that
depending on your workload you might opt for one over the other one last bit of
performance testing pci express 4.0
we weren't expecting much in terms of performance uplift here and that's
exactly what we got at least with these workloads i mean
some games see a couple of extra frames and these spec view perf numbers are a
little bit higher but that's about it as for thermals
well the good news is it could be worse but the bad news is that it's only true
because it hasn't caught fire yet the rx 5700 seems fine but it looks like there
are some early teething issues with the rx 5700 xt that caused our unit to boost
itself into oblivion and overheat eventually shutting down under certain
conditions like sitting in a game menu for too long
these kinds of lapses in qa testing are exactly why we get upset when
manufacturers like AMD rush things to market rather than
waiting until they're fully cooked pardon the pun the lightest maybe say
that anyway assuming they can squish this bug and tame the beast the value
proposition is an interesting one on the one hand NVIDIA's rtx 2070 non-super is
probably going to be a pretty good deal in the near future as stores get rid of
stock to make room for super but the rtx 2060 super being a slower
card plays into AMD's hand here they targeted their rx 5700 xt at the
2070 and it's now priced like a 2060 super
it may not win on all fronts and if NVIDIA's objectively better software and
feature suite mean nothing to you then the rx 5700 series
often manages superior performance per dollar in gaming and for productivity it
trades blows enough that it'll be worth it for many especially Linux and apple
users who enjoy superior driver support from AMD
so early adopter issues aside it's not the
groundbreaking industry shaker upper that ryzen 3rd gen is where AMD
dismantled Intel's entire consumer product lineup
but it's worth buying which is honestly more than we expected given how much of
AMD's GPU division has defected to Intel in the last couple of quarters one thing
that concerns us though is where do they go from here it's tough to
see how AMD will release a higher end card with this architecture without
resorting to liquid cooling and five nanometers is unlikely to tame
the inferno but today's a happy day
let's deal with that problem tomorrow and today can be your happy day thanks
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