AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT Gets Substantial Performance Bump on PCIe 4.0 vs. 3.0

[Tsing]

Radeon RX 5500 XT owners aren't likely to splurge on an X570 motherboard, but the few that do may reap some benefit. According to benchmarks from PC Games Hardware, the 4 GB variant of the RX 5500 XT achieves average framerate improvements of as much as 33 FPS when the GPU is run on PCIe 4.0 rather than 3.0. Some of the bigger differences can be spotted in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Far Cry New Dawn, and Wolfenstein: Youngblood.

The benchmarks couldn't be clearer. The 4 GiByte variant takes last place in every test if it is connected with the PCI Express 3.0 interface, which is still commercially available. However, if you provide the card with a Ryzen 3000 base, the frame rates increase by at least ten, and in the case of Far Cry New Dawn by as much as 78 percent.

 

[Dan_D]

Jesus.

 

[Grimlakin]

WOW... it's impressive how much a different memory bandwidth makes!

 

[Elf_Boy]

One wonders if there is a driver bug or some other reason coming into play. Would increasing onboard memory accomplish the same boost?

If it is due to pushing textures or somesuch through the pcie bus would overclocking ram or the buss also help?

 

[Eduardo_Domingot]

Unexpected honestly even for the 4GB model.
I get why but didn't expect a big boost.

 

[Uvilla]

Can't make sense of that one.
Future Navi/Ryzen 2 apu performance preview?
The new APU leaks are still with vega graphics, Ryzen / navi apus can't be far off.. they should do it with hbm2, even with with 4gb its obvious it will be a beast.

 

[SmokeRngs]

I don't understand why this would be the case. There's no way that card could saturate the PCI-e 3.0 bus to the point where you would need PCI-e 4.0.

I'm wondering how exactly they tested the card to come up with these numbers. If they used an x570 board did they use a 3xxx CPU for all of it and if so how did they change the bus from 4.0 to 3.0. If it's just a manual selection in software or BIOS to force 3.0 operation the issue may be with the motherboard or implementation of what was used to force 3.0 causing the performance to be much lower than it should.

With everything working properly the only reason to see results like this would be an over saturated bus and the card isn't capable of doing that.

 

[Riccochet]

I don't understand why this would be the case. There's no way that card could saturate the PCI-e 3.0 bus to the point where you would need PCI-e 4.0.

I'm wondering how exactly they tested the card to come up with these numbers. If they used an x570 board did they use a 3xxx CPU for all of it and if so how did they change the bus from 4.0 to 3.0. If it's just a manual selection in software or BIOS to force 3.0 operation the issue may be with the motherboard or implementation of what was used to force 3.0 causing the performance to be much lower than it should.

With everything working properly the only reason to see results like this would be an over saturated bus and the card isn't capable of doing that.

Indeed you can force 3.0 or 4.0 operation in X570 BIOS.

I'd like to see the test done with the same CPU on a X470 mobo where PCIe 4.0 is not unlocked.

 

[SeymourGore]

Sounds like a FPSr-style investigation is in order!

 

[David_Schroth]

Sounds like a FPSr-style investigation is in order!

This sort of comparison has been on @Brent_Justice 's backlog since the pcie4 launch... This may move it up a little bit.

 

[Strelok]

There's gotta be some kind of bug here, that seems insane. The 8GB version is basically within error margins.

 

[David_Schroth]

There's gotta be some kind of bug here, that seems insane. The 8GB version is basically within error margins.

I initially read it as being only applicable to the 4GB card and hypothesized that it made using system memory a lot faster as virtual gpu memory then I saw the 8gb numbers. Gave up at that point and mentally put it on the list of followups...

 

[Strelok]

I initially read it as being only applicable to the 4GB card and hypothesized that it made using system memory a lot faster as virtual gpu memory then I saw the 8gb numbers. Gave up at that point and mentally put it on the list of followups...

I just saw that too, wow. I might be wrong here, but is the 5500XT limited to PCIE 3/4 at x8? Still, for a mid/low end card it's a bit crazy for there to be such a huge difference in memory bandwidth.

 

[Ranulfo]

I just saw that too, wow. I might be wrong here, but is the 5500XT limited to PCIE 3/4 at x8? Still, for a mid/low end card it's a bit crazy for there to be such a huge difference in memory bandwidth.

Its a 8x card. So in theory, more bandwidth available at 4.0 8x speed than 3.0 8x speed. Combine it with a 128bit memory bus and voila?

AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT Specs

AMD Navi 14, 1845 MHz, 1408 Cores, 88 TMUs, 32 ROPs, 4096 MB GDDR6, 1750 MHz, 128 bit

www.techpowerup.com

 

[SmokeRngs]

I didn't realize the card only ran at x8 PCI-e. It's not something I've ever looked up before as I figured any card would be x16.

This is quite annoying to me as I was possibly looking to pick up a 5500XT if I can come up with the money to replace my ancient HD5770 and this one is about the max I might be able to afford. I'm not looking at nVidia cards at all and would prefer a newer architecture than something like a Radeon 570. However, I'm running a Ryzen 2600x on a B450 motherboard and I'd hate to see my performance hamstringed because of this. Sure, I'm still not going to be playing the absolute newest games but they won't be the newest forever and some I may pick up over time.