AMDįaster, more efficient clocks and faster, more efficient memory both provide tangible benefits to PC gamers. “We will continue to support that in markets that make sense.” For these Radeon RX 5700 cards in particular, GDDR6 lets AMD “hit better price points still get great performance” while being more widely adopted than HBM2, whose pricing he called “volatile.” The power-hungry Vega cards needed HBM2’s energy efficiency, but AMD says GDDR6 offers 60-percent-improved performance per watt versus GDDR5. “We are not ruling out HBM2 in our roadmap,” Herkelman told me in our Full Nerd interview. The Navi cards we’re reviewing today hit 448GB/second of memory bandwidth thanks to their 8GB capacity and 256-bit bus. It’s more of a lateral move performance-wise for AMD, because HBM2’s 2,048-bit wide memory interface allowed for excellent memory bandwidth speeds. AMD switched to traditional GDDR6 memory for these new cards, matching Nvidia’s current GeForce lineup.įor Nvidia, the switch from GDDR5 to GDDR6 provided enormous throughput benefit thanks to GDDR6’s much faster speeds. The Radeon VII and Vega GPUs utilized second-generation high-bandwidth memory stacks, continuing the HBM push that AMD spearheaded with the Fury X in 2015. The Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT also change the underlying memory configuration. In the Full Nerd interview at the top of this article, Radeon boss Scott Herkelman acknowledged that overclocked, custom-cooled models by AMD partners could very well push gaming speeds closer to the Boost clock rating, as you’d expect. Note that it says “minimum expected GPU clock,” and that they were obtained using AMD’s blower-style reference cards. But AMD’s also listing a “game clock,” that represents “the minimum expected GPU clock when running gaming applications.” It warns that those speeds aren’t guaranteed or even set in the VBIOS, but is instead simply “a guide used to set expectations with gamers.” Nvidia handles its listed Boost clocks in the same manner, so if you want to compare GeForce cards against the Radeon RX 5700’s speeds, look there. The company’s providing three clock speeds for Navi GPUs: Base and boost are what you’d expect, defining the upper and lower limits. AMD also introduced new clock speed terminology to more clearly express estimated performance levels. No matter how you measure it, that’s a good thing. Speaking of clocks, the Radeon RX 57 XT hit much, much higher clock speeds than AMD’s previous cards, surpassing Vega’s best by hundreds of megahertz. Those performance-per-clock improvements also make the TFLOPS comparisons in the chart above misleading, as these Navi GPUs do more with each teraflop. The company’s architecture deep-dive for reporters touted some impressive numbers for Navi: 25 percent more performance per clock versus Vega, and a whopping 50-percent performance increase overall at the same power levels. These new graphics cards perform tasks differently from their predecessors at a fundamental level. Compared to AMD’s long-lasting GCN architecture (which Vega is based on), the new RDNA architecture introduces several radical changes to the underlying GPU design, unleashing significant hardware-level overhauls to everything from the cache to the graphics engine to the compute units themselves. While that table provides a helpful overview, note that you can not simply compare the number of compute units and stream processors between the Vega GPUs and the “Navi” GPUs in the Radeon RX 5700 series. (Radeon boss Scott Herkelman confirmed that Vega will be disappearing in The Full Nerd interview embedded above.) AMD Here’s an AMD-supplied list of technological specifications for the Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT, alongside the same stats for the Radeon RX Vega GPUs they’re replacing in AMD’s product stack. Let’s kick things off by examining the hardware, before delving into some new software features later.
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