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Inside AMD’s Radeon 5700 Big Day

Inside AMD’s Radeon 5700 Big Day

Arthur Gies
VarietyJune 10, 2019

This was supposed to be AMD’s E3.

AMD’s fortunes in the PC space have been mixed for years, as graphics rival Nvidia has continually leapfrogged the company in performance and features. As AMD ceded market share to Nvidia in the GPU space, it similarly struggled to compete with chip giant Intel, managing to sustain a toehold in the CPU market only at the budget level for years.

 

But, in 2018, with AMD’s second generation Ryzen chipset, the manufacturer’s fortunes improved, as the new hardware competed favorably with Intel’s offerings at much lower cost to consumers. As the gaming audience gained confidence in AMD’s CPU hardware, and AMD promised even more improvements with Ryzen 3 (or Zen 2, as the architecture is known), hope grew that AMD could also regain competitiveness in the graphics space. AMD’s next generation Navi tech has been whispered about and speculated on ad nauseum in tech publications and forums for literally years, which has reached a nearly fever pitch as both Sony and now Microsoft confirmed their next-generation consoles will use Zen 2 and Navi tech.

All that was left was for AMD to deliver. Easier said than done, granted, given the high hopes coming into this week’s E3, but even trying to keep expectations in check, it’s difficult to know just where AMD stands now that everything is out in the open.

 

Zen 2 and the Ryzen 3 processors it powers are, more or less, what was expected, offering very competitive performance at aggressive price points that situate them well against Intel’s current CPUs. But any advantages are minor, and Intel has new hardware coming very soon that seems poised to bring its own performance improvements and muddy any claims of price/power/performance superiority for AMD.

But more damningly for AMD, Navi does not appear to be the savior of AMD’s brand that many fans had hoped. The card the company debuted today, the Radeon 5700, isn’t even at the high end of its line, instead aiming to compete with Nvidia’s enthusiast RTX 2070 and 2060 GPUs. AMD’s performance talks aimed squarely at entrenched, years-old standards for PC gamers, belaboring results at 1440p and 120hz, rather than discussing 4K performance, with benchmark numbers that even when picked to most favor the 5700 line, don’t yield more than a few percentage points of performance improvements over the Nvidia cards they aim to compete with — for just $50 less.

The most notable moment of AMD’s press conference, however, is what wasn’t there, especially when compared with the competition.

The graphics buzzword of 2019 thus far has been ray tracing, in real time. Nvidia released their RTX line of GPUs last Fall with hardware dedicated to the tech, but uptake has only seemed to gain steam this year, dominating much of the coverage and panels at this year’s GDC. This snowball effect continued in April, as Sony announced that their upcoming PlayStation, which was using AMD tech, would support real-time ray tracing. This week, Microsoft confirmed that their upcoming Xbox console platform, codenamed Project Scarlett, which also includes AMD-based chips, would include hardware-accelerated support for ray tracing.

But there was no direct discussion whatsoever during AMD’s press conference about the tech, including more general, shader-based approaches to ray tracing that are less efficient than hardware-based implementations, but still provide some of the visual benefits. Instead, AMD made repeated allusions to “performance killing features” on its competitor’s products, likely alluding to the steep performance penalties incurred in many current titles that employ ray traced visual effects.

AMD’s lack of a codified strategy on ray tracing technology seems to put them on the outside of a trend with apparent momentum. Navi has been a repository for AMD fans hopes for the future of the company and its ability to compete on equal footing with Nvidia’s best GPUs. Whether these new GPUs can live up to such aspirations remains to be seen. Final judgments will have to wait until AMD’s new cards reach store shelves, along with its Ryzen 3 CPUs, on July 7.

Inside AMD’s Radeon 5700 Big Day 

4 Replies

Thought about this last night. Amazon Prime Day is going to be, in all likelyhood July 15th, so it wouldn't surprise me to see Navi and Ryzen 3000 below MSRP.

assuming adequate stocks prices should be level for a few days before discounting surfaces

shortages will be problematic 

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While I agree AMD should be competing at the High End and should have an immediate solution for ray tracing on the upcoming PC cards, this isn't news, or at least an unknown letdown. This has been said since we first started hearing about navi. The initial cards were always going to be mid level cards. Then more recently when the RTX cards came out it was said early on that no the initial Navi cards would not have that tech and would come next in the true next gen architecture. So I think they are going to continue to errode market share by not having these features and especially if Intel deliver and if nVidia lower the price point on their upcoming refresh. AMD is still struggling to get their drivers stable and feautures working on past GCN cards so yah that makes people nervous to invest in upcoming cards that nobody really understands what is next gen about them or how they will be making them stable and why they are worth even upgrading to if they don't support new features and are not enough faster for the price they sell for. The new sharpening feature they showed the pictures of made me laugh. The so called sharpened picture didn't look better than that game does on my 580 to me. In fact the so called default looked crazy blurry. It's like they are adding a blur feature and you can turn it off, not like it is sharper. At least by the pictures they have shown so far. So time will tell. I guess we hope for the best. I don't get the surprise factor in any of this as it really is unfolding just like they already said it would long ago.

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The Crytek raytrace demo used a Radeon 56 and it ran fine. So next year's cards should be powerful enough for new shaders like the one Crytek demonstrated. nVidia's hair is more SDK than a conventional shader which necessitates more CPU cores. My R5 2400G has 4/8 cores/threads and if necessary I can get a 8/16 processor if game coding is too demanding.

My video cards now are struggling at 3840x2160 and the Radeon VII is adequate but now that Navi is near I am waiting to see what is available.

Polatis cards are so inexpensive now and I was considering an 8GB card mostly to have enough VRAM for games. The Radeon VII offers 16GB which is more than any nVidia card in that price band.

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