Is AMD latest Navi graphics card, the Radeon RX 5700 XT good for content creators?
How is the performance compared to Vega Frontier Edition?
Can you run it in your Hackintosh build?
Let’s find out…
Hi, I’m Teresa from morgonaut.cloud and I help people with Hackintosh builds, Macintosh
computers, Linux servers, simply with computers.
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Right in the beginning I have to say, if you are living in hope you will buy the Radeon
5700 XT for your Hackintosh build and enjoy it’s performance for such a low price, you
are out of luck, at least for now.
After my initial tests it is not compatible even with the latest beta of macOS 10.15 Catalina.
But!
As for example appleinsider wrote on their website there are “eight references to GPUs
bearing the "RX" and "Pro" prefixes in macOS Catalina beta, including seven under "Vega 20.””
Link to this article you can find in video description.
So for sure we can’t know at this point what exact cards that indicates, but I strongly
believe support for the AMD Radeon 5700 cards will come to macOS Catalina soon.
And because I cannot test this card under macOS, I prepared for you little preview of
what this card is capable in my “beloved” Windows 10, grrrr :) So for comparison or
as a reference card I chose amazing AMD GPU for content creators, the Vega Frontier Edition
with 16GB of VRAM, which I used in my main production machine for long time until I replaced
it with Radeon VII last month.
Both GPUs I tested in the same computer with Intel Core i9-9900k and 64GB of HyperX memory
at 3200 MHz CL16 timings.
So as you can see, I’m really running the Vega Frontier Edition with 4096 shaders and
AMD 19.7.2 driver.
Let’s start with the Luxmark benchmark.
28 778 points.
Now let’s move on to Geekbench OpenCL benchmark.
180 965 points.
And as a real life test I chose render test of my last video project.
I’m using at the date of shooting the latest DaVinci Resolve beta 6 version.
My timeline is at 4K resolution, 30 fps, my source media are ProRes 422 LT, 4K resolution, 30 fps
and it's 10-bit footage as well some H.264 screen recordings.
Timeline resolution in 4K, no automatic precaching of content, no render cache, I’ll delete
any leftovers, no optimized media.
So work from direct source media.
Timeline scrubbing is not so smooth as on my macOS Mojave system.
So let’s render it out and set a reference render time to beat.
So the Vega Frontier Edition rendered my quite 6 minutes long project in 9 minutes 33 seconds.
So let’s finaly move to the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT.
Radeon RX 5700 XT, Navi 10 architecture, 2560 shaders, 8 gigs of VRAM and most important
information here is the AMD driver version.
Same as for the Vega Frontier test, so 19.7.2.
I’ll show you it’s really at the date of shooting of this video really the latest
driver available.
I will tell you why this is important later in this video.
So let’s start again with Luxmark benchmark.
29985 points.
So the Radeon RX 5700 XT is 4.2% faster than the Vega Frontier Edition in this test.
So let’s move on to Geekbench OpenCL test.
316379 points.
Absolutely overkill.
I’ll talk about it later.
And as before let’s redo the same render test in DaVinci Resolve.
Time to beat is 9 minutes 33 seconds.
So the Radeon RX 5700 XT rendered this project in 10 minutes 9 seconds, that’s 6.3% slower
than the Vega Frontier Edition.
But you maybe didn’t noticed one very important thing.
Look at my source ProRes media previews.
They are crippled.
Media itself plays fine, but previews are distorted.
Same but opposite problem with is the H.264 footage.
Previews are fine, but the media plays with huge artifacts.
When I check the final rendered file, everything is absolutely fine, no artifacts present,
but simply only in timeline it’s terrible.
This is definately a driver issue, I get the same problem when testing the 5700 XT under Linux.
On the media page it’s even more prominent.
So that’s why I showed you few minutes ago I’m really running it on the latest available
AMD driver.
So let’s hope AMD will fix this issue soon!
So let’s summarize it.
Vega Frontier Edition has 4096 shader units versus only 2560 on the 5700 XT.
In another words the 5700 XT has only quite half the shaders than the Vega FE, Vega FE
has super fast HBM memory versus GDDR6 on the 5700 XT, but still 5700 XT can beat the
Vega FE in OpenCL benchmarks while is just 6.3% slower in video rendering in DaVinci
Resolve.
Maybe it’s also due to some kind of problem in those AMD drivers.
Another interesting finding is the 5700 XT core clock was most of the time at 2000 MHz
while the rendering, and as you may know I never overclock CPUs nor GPUs, I always show
the stock performance you can get.
As you saw the 5700 XT crushed the Vega Frontier Edition quite as double the score in Geekbench
OpenCL benchmark - 316 379 points vs just 180 965 points = 5700 XT is 74.8% faster in
this test.
When we compare it to other GPUs, the Radeon RX 5700 XT is far above the Nvidia RTX 2080 and
very close to Tesla V100 and Titan RTX, so 5700 XT belongs to the elite club of most
powerful GPUs.
Overall, the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT is by my opinion very capable GPU, which can handle 3D OpenCL
rendering or 4K video editing without any problem.
It can handle even 8K 60fps footage as I tested.
Hackintosh users must wait a little bit until the support will hopefuly come to macOS 10.15
Catalina.
So if you want new hackintosh build RIGHT NOW and don’t want to wait, you should stick
with Vega GPU.
Or even better, the Radeon VII, which is far the best currently supported GPU for macOS
and Hackintosh - BTW I made whole video dedicated just to Radeon VII on Hackintosh, so watch
it if you are interested about it’s performance.
But as I said, I strongly believe in close future the support for 5700 XT will come to
macOS Catalina.
BTW yes, you can see well, I have some more surprises for you in my next videos, so stay
tuned :) So I hope I gave you again some new inspiration,
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see you next time my Hackintosh friends.