AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT & Radeon RX 5500 7nm Navi 14 GPUs Unveiled

Scougar · 15 Dec 2019 at 22:51

arc@css said:
Yeah, the VRAM capacity was the only differing factor in the video I saw (Hardware Unboxed).

Results vary significantly between reviews. More than I expected tbh. If you have the time, take a look at some others. Worth reading The reviews and looking at the settings where they clearly Max out the memory, and then the reviews that don't.

arc@css · 15 Dec 2019 at 22:53

Scougar said:
Results vary significantly between reviews. More than I expected tbh. If you have the time, take a look at some others. Worth reading The reviews and looking at the settings where they clearly Max out the memory, and then the reviews that don't.

I may well do. It'll be interesting to see the results between more than one brand.

ANDREW GREEN · 16 Dec 2019 at 07:34

Scougar said:
Only if it exceeds the 4gb. Then the 4gb model gets weird for some reason. Below 4gb they are almost identical.

I don't understand why AMDs card has this issue and Nvidia's does not. Is it the compreshion they're using?

Scougar · 16 Dec 2019 at 12:45

ANDREW GREEN said:
I don't understand why AMDs card has this issue and Nvidia's does not. Is it the compreshion they're using?

They do, it just seems to happen a little later. I have seen it commented on a few times now in reviews. If you mean "weird"... That was to an odd of issue on the a Sapphire 4gb issue. In fairness I shouldn't have mentioned it, and only the normal mem limitation of 4gb when exceeded like on any card.

Scougar · 17 Dec 2019 at 02:09

Was looking at an MSI slide.... "Extra Thermal Padding", and "Ample Thermal Padding". Claiming that more padding is better. Hmm... If you saw the thickness of these pads I think that that is counter intuitive having thicker pads? But what do I know. Lol

Scougar · 17 Dec 2019 at 17:36

https://youtu.be/8nV6Ftm2xpw

This is a good video by hardware unboxed. Detailing 4gb vs 8gb 5500xt.

FoxEye · 18 Dec 2019 at 01:05

BigBANGtheory said:
More options in a price/perf bracket already well catered for imho

It might be "well catered for" in terms of the number of products at this price point, but consider that they've all been the same performance for the last 6 years, since the 290. Then came the 390 then the 480 then the 580 then this... and they're all by and large the same perf at a constant price.

How do they expect consumers to get excited by that?

Or do they just expect people who upgrade to keep moving up the pricing tiers each time? So when you wan to upgrade a £200 card from 3 years ago they want you to spend £300 now. That's some hefty inflation right there.

Scougar · 18 Dec 2019 at 06:01

Looked it up.. 290x around same perf as a 480.

2013 290X release price: $549
2016 480 release price: $199
2019 5500 XT release price: $199

Whilst the 5500 XT is faster, indeed... that gap of 3 years, it really shouldn't have still been this price for this perf. This is why I keep on moaning (and at this point it really is) about spending money on a card in the past few years. I feel cheated.

Scougar · 19 Dec 2019 at 12:17

Interesting article on pci-3.0 possibly slowing down the 5500xt as these cards only use 8 lanes.

https://www.neowin.net/news/pcie-30-could-be-crippling-amds-rx-5500-xt-performance

They didn't say it was 100% the issue, but pci-4.0 is definitely faster. They used different CPUs by the looks of it, I would have thought at least the same chip on an older board, or just disabling pci-4.0 on the board

oweneades · 19 Dec 2019 at 13:07

Yeah could easily be tested by forcing the board into a previous gen PCI-e mode.

KillBoY_UK · 19 Dec 2019 at 13:42

Scougar said:
Interesting article on pci-3.0 possibly slowing down the 5500xt as these cards only use 8 lanes.

https://www.neowin.net/news/pcie-30-could-be-crippling-amds-rx-5500-xt-performance

They didn't say it was 100% the issue, but pci-4.0 is definitely faster. They used different CPUs by the looks of it, I would have thought at least the same chip on an older board, or just disabling pci-4.0 on the board

Presuming its being set to only 8 lanes of PCIE3 and not 16 of PCIE4 on a 5500XT. I really doubt its going to make any differences seeing how little a 2080ti is affected dropping from 16x to 8x pcie3.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-pci-express-scaling/6.html

Scougar · 19 Dec 2019 at 14:44

KillBoY_UK said:
Presuming its being set to only 8 lanes of PCIE3 and not 16 of PCIE4 on a 5500XT. I really doubt its going to make any differences seeing how little a 2080ti is affected dropping from 16x to 8x pcie3.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-pci-express-scaling/6.html

Just putting it out there. These guys ran the same test with a 5700 xt and saw no impact, so just putting it out there. I would for sure like to see more proof.

Panos · 19 Dec 2019 at 23:09

KillBoY_UK said:
Presuming its being set to only 8 lanes of PCIE3 and not 16 of PCIE4 on a 5500XT. I really doubt its going to make any differences seeing how little a 2080ti is affected dropping from 16x to 8x pcie3.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-pci-express-scaling/6.html

The original Article. There is performance improvement, significant one also

https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Rade...pecials/PCI-Express-3-vs-PCI-E-4-GPU-1339415/

In addition since quoting techpowerup.....
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/pci-express-4-0-performance-scaling-radeon-rx-5700-xt/10.html

Has full scaling on 5700XT between 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0. Some games the different is 1-2fps on others pretty substantial like F1 2018
And that all way back from July drivers.

Scougar · 19 Dec 2019 at 23:27

I think we can agree though, spending silly money on an x570 board just to get pci-e 4.0 for a budget card is not a smart use of money.

Panos · 20 Dec 2019 at 08:24

Scougar said:
I think we can agree though, spending silly money on an x570 board just to get pci-e 4.0 for a budget card is not a smart use of money.

Considering that some are so close to £200 mark, at £250 the 5700 is a boon. Yet still cannot understand why AMD did that.
Similarly why vram bottleneck the 5700XT

Scougar · 20 Dec 2019 at 12:10

Panos said:
Considering that some are so close to £200 mark, at £250 the 5700 is a boon. Yet still cannot understand why AMD did that.
Similarly why vram bottleneck the 5700XT

A

Seems like it was a very intentional. choice Have v4.0 early with double cost boards ... Or not. Trying to be ahead of the arms race. It doesn't seem to have cost them sales but I suspect because of backwards compatibly with older boards. If I had to guess I bet it was the compatibly with older boards that made them vote on favor of v4.0 on the new ones.

bru · 20 Dec 2019 at 12:58

Well if it was intentional then it was a completely stupid move, as who in their right mind buying a budget 5500 series card is going to pair it with an expensive 570 PCIe gen4 board?

DragonQ · 20 Dec 2019 at 13:55

From what I've seen, if you want to buy new, an RX 590 is a better choice than a 5500 XT if you don't have PCIe 4.0. Slightly better performance on average for slightly less money. A 5500XT might have the edge with PCIe 4.0 but as others have said, spending £150+ on a motherboard to pair it with a ~£200 card is just dumb in most cases. Would be better to get a B450 board and a 1660 Super.

KillBoY_UK · 20 Dec 2019 at 14:33

Panos said:
The original Article. There is performance improvement, significant one also

https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Rade...pecials/PCI-Express-3-vs-PCI-E-4-GPU-1339415/

In addition since quoting techpowerup.....
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/pci-express-4-0-performance-scaling-radeon-rx-5700-xt/10.html

Has full scaling on 5700XT between 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0. Some games the different is 1-2fps on others pretty substantial like F1 2018
And that all way back from July drivers.

First link reaction: AMD badly need to work on the efficiency there GPU's hardware and software stack

2nd link: 2-5% at worse on a higher end GPU.

Something seems broken if the 5500XT is held back that much but not the 5700XT. Must be doing loads of unnecessary read/writes to the main system bus

Scougar · 20 Dec 2019 at 18:04

So the "special case" of Wolfenstein and it using streaming textures seems to have killed the performance of the 4gb 5500xt on pci-e. (That odd behaviour was also seen on other reviews with Wolfenstein). I wonder why the 1650 super didn't suffer the same fate, does that use 16 lanes instead of only 8?

Now... If anyone can find a review of the 5500 xt 4gb card using an x570 board and a ryzen 3xxx chip, I would like to see that please.

Seems like a misstep to me given this is a budget card.