Final Points & Summary
There you have it; this was the AMD Next Horizon Gaming E3 2019 keynote at E3. While this did cover a lot of new information, we feel it didn’t quite deliver all the information we were hoping for in regards to the GPU specifications. The first half of the event was a re-cap of CPU information we already learned at COMPUTEX this year. Only a few new gaming performance slides were shown, and a demonstration that was a good selling point for the Ryzen 9 3900X.
GPU
The second half of the event kicked off with the GPU information we were waiting for. The announcement of the AMD Radeon 5700 XT and Radeon RX 5700. AMD delivered to us the specifications in terms of names, Compute Unit counts, clock speeds, TFLOPs and VRAM capacity. We also got pricing thankfully. However, there was a lot of information not revealed as well.
We did not get a solid reveal on the TDP of the video cards. We never had any mention of the memory clock speed and memory bandwidth figures. We did not get any information on the ROP and TMU configuration or even the bus-width. Considering these GPUs use GDDR6 there was no mention at all of the new memory controller that these GPUs must use since we are dealing with new memory types here, moving away from HBM. The memory controller alone would be a highly interesting topic to discuss and bring up, as it would need a new memory controller for GDDR6. There was no mention at all of any type of hardware specific features that are new to RDNA or Radeon RX 5700/XT.
Quite simply all we got was the most topical shallow reveal of the video cards. There was no real “meat” on the bones so to speak. Honestly, I thought there would be more information revealed about them, at the very least TDP and memory bandwidth and clock speeds.
We have learned though that AMD has no answer for 4K gamers. The realm of 4K gaming is still left to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. The AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT and non-XT are targeted for 1440p gameplay. It seems from a price and performance perspective that the Radeon RX 5700/XT are perfect replacement video cards for the Radeon RX Vega 56 and 64.
The Vega cards had a high production cost with HBM memory pricing and all. Now that Radeon RX 5700/XT use GDDR6 and 7nm production costs and margins might be better and would allow AMD to finally make some money in that segment. We will have to see how they perform in the real-world while gaming. NVIDIA still has that pesky advantage of being able to provide RTX Raytracing support in games and so far, we have no answer from AMD on that.
CPU
The CPU side of AMD seems to be extremely exciting. Very unbalanced from the GPU side of things. On the CPU side AMD is killing it with affordable high-core-count CPUs and gaming performance. Having now not only a 12-Core/24-Thread CPU at an affordable price for gaming but also now a 16-Core/32-Thread CPU with a high 4.7GHz clock speed at an affordable price is just bonkers.
Gone are the days of AMD trying to pick up the slack behind Intel, now AMD is leading, they are pushing CPU technology and performance forward. More people are going to be able to afford more powerful CPUs to get things done and it’s going to be very exciting.