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We were really excited to get an AMD Radeon 5700 XT based on the new 7nm Navi architecture. And we were really frustrated trying to get it to run in the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark. In fact, we failed. We tried two AIBs and they both exhibited the same problem
We ran the AMD AIB through our standard series of tests which includes (TimeSpy Extreme, TimeSpy, Civilization, The Division 2, Shadow of Tomb Raider, Metro Exodus), in 4K and 1440P with High Pre-set when available. After running the suite, we use the scores and FPS to plug into the Pmark equation.
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| Equation for the Pmark |
The Radeon RX 5700 XT Navi 10 XT is AMD’s current high-end AIB, released in July 2019 and fabricated at TSMC’s 7nm process.
The Navi 10 graphics processor is an average-sized chip with a die area of 251 mm² and has 10.3 billion transistors. There are 2560 shading units, 160 texture mapping units and it can run 64 ROPs. The 5700 XT has 8GB of GDDR6 with a 256-bit memory interface. The GPU runs at 1.6G GHz, with overclocking up to 1.76 GHz, while the memory is running at 1.75 GHz.
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| AMD Radeon 5700 XT |
The dual-slot AIB uses 1x 6-pin + 1x 8-pin power connectors and draws 225 W maximum. Display outputs include 1x HDMI, 3x DisplayPort. Radeon RX 5700 XT and the AIB plugs into a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 interface. The AIB supports DirectX 12.0, and Vulkan 1.0, and its price at launch was 399 US Dollars.
Priced at less than Nvidia’s RTX 2070 ($500) and RTX 2080 ($749), its Pmark is better than the 2080 Super, but the 5700 XT comes up short in raw FPS.
We ran the boards on two platforms, an Intel and the new AMD
The Intel platform has an Intel Core i7-8700 running at 3.7 GHz, in an EVGA Z370 Classified K with 34 GB Corsair RAM.
The AMD platform has a Ryzen 9 3900X 12-core, running at 3.8 GHz in a Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master, with 16GB RAM.
Both systems run Windows10 x64 Version 1803, and we used an LG Ultra HD 27.2-in monitor.
We saw a difference between the test data due to the platforms.
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| Pmark and fps comparison between AMD Radeon 5700 XT and Nvidia’s RTX 2070 and 2080 Super in an Intel platform |
The AMD had 20% more cores and ran 0.7% faster, and that difference showed up in the test scores.
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| Pmark and fps comparison between AMD Radeon 5700 XT and Nvidia’s RTX 2070 and 2080 Super in an AMD platform |
We were never able to resolve the AIB’s inability to run the SOTR benchmark.
What do we think?
For the money the AMD Radeon 5700 XT is a good choice, with a gamer suitable average of 64 FPS. The Nvidia AIBs beat it on fps and have the added advantage of being able to run ray tracing games — and they cost more.
Meanwhile, AMD has spoken about two new AIBs dubbed the “Nvidia Killers” based on new GPUs—Navi 21 and Navi 23—should be released in 2020.
With these new AIBs, AMD plans to target the high-end market segment where it has seen little success in the past few years. AMD plans to challenge Nvidia’s RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti by highlighting their improved performance capabilities. The company will likely continue to employ competitive pricing to target customers in the high-end market segment.
These forthcoming AIBs should help AMD bridge the market share gap.
The market shares for the desktop discrete GPU suppliers shifted in the quarter too, AMD increased market share from last quarter, and Nvidia increased share from last year.
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| Market share changes quarter-to-quarter, and year-to-year |
The company has historically played a secondary role to Nvidia in GPU market share but has seen steady improvement is share gain over the past five quarters.