 Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Oh, oh. Right. Sorry, it's been a long couple of weeks. First, AMD announced their new Radeon and Ryzen 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 third gen Ryzen processors. A Ridge wallet is a sleek way to keep wallet bulge down thanks to its compact frame and RFID blocking interplates. Use the offer code in the video description to save 10% on your Ridge wallet and get free worldwide shipping. First, the cards themselves. We've got three SKUs available at launch. The mid-range RX 5700 series is available on the Xbox One and Xbox One Plus. The first is the Radeon RX 5700 series. It is 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, RDNA 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 AMD should be far lower, giving them more mobility in terms of pricing, an important point we'll get to later on. For now, I wanna 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, maybe a thing of the past. Along with the hardware, AMD's launching a host of new features, some of which are novel, 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 single 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, NVENC 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 TLDR is that you can think of it kind of like a V-Sync for your CPU, but unlike V-Sync, 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 has caught the high-speed camera bugs, 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 FidelityFX framework. You can think of this a bit like graphics-tweaking packages like Reshade or SuiteFX, 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 and 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 Vulkan 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. Heh heh heh heh. Mm. 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 hairworks 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 reran it a bunch of times on all the cards, and even though the 2070 Super isn't that far ahead of the 2070 in 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 Katia and Solidworks, even from the RTX 2070 Super. And as for the rest of SpecFewperf, 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 the 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 SpecFewperf 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 in 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 a 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 to Massdrop and the Sennheiser PC37X gaming headset. Its open back design gives you a wide stereo image from drivers that come from the venerable HD598 and HD600 headphones. You'll get clearer audio for gaming and music, and for comms, you get a noise canceling microphone optimized to handle unpleasant pops and hisses that automatically mutes when you rotate it out of the way. Best of all, its 10 foot braided cable is strong enough and long enough to reach around even the most elaborate gaming setup. Buy it today from drop.com at the link below. Thanks for watching guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or check out the link to where to buy some of the stuff we featured in the video description, maybe not the 5700 XT right now, but the 5700 should be fine. And also linked in the description is our merch store where you can get cool shirts like this one, and also this hoodie, and our community forum, which you should totally join.