A Quick Note on Architecture & Features

With pages upon pages of architectural documents still to get through in only a few hours, for today’s launch news I’m not going to have the time to go in depth on new features or the architecture. So I want to very briefly hit the high points on what the major features are, and also provide some answers to what are likely to be some common questions.

Starting with the architecture itself, one of the biggest changes for RDNA is the width of a wavefront, the fundamental group of work. GCN in all of its iterations was 64 threads wide, meaning 64 threads were bundled together into a single wavefront for execution. RDNA drops this to a native 32 threads wide. At the same time, AMD has expanded the width of their SIMDs from 16 slots to 32 (aka SIMD32), meaning the size of a wavefront now matches the SIMD size. This is one of AMD’s key architectural efficiency changes, as it helps them keep their SIMD slots occupied more often. It also means that a wavefront can be passed through the SIMDs in a single cycle, instead of over 4 cycles on GCN parts.

In terms of compute, there are not any notable feature changes here as far as gaming is concerned. How things work under the hood has changed dramatically at points, but from the perspective of a programmer, there aren’t really any new math operations here that are going to turn things on their head. RDNA of course supports Rapid Packed Math (Fast FP16), so programmers who make use of FP16 will get to enjoy those performance benefits.

With a single exception, there also aren’t any new graphics features. Navi does not include any hardware ray tracing support, nor does it support variable rate pixel shading. AMD is aware of the demands for these, and hardware support for ray tracing is in their roadmap for RDNA 2 (the architecture formally known as “Next Gen”). But none of that is present here.

The one exception to all of this is the primitive shader. Vega’s most infamous feature is back, and better still it’s enabled this time. The primitive shader is compiler controlled, and thanks to some hardware changes to make it more useful, it now makes sense for AMD to turn it on for gaming. Vega’s primitive shader, though fully hardware functional, was difficult to get a real-world performance boost from, and as a result AMD never exposed it on Vega.

Unique in consumer parts for the new 5700 series cards is support for PCI Express 4.0. Designed to go hand-in-hand with AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series CPUs, which are introducing support for the feature as well, PCIe 4.0 doubles the amount of bus bandwidth available to the card, rising from ~16GB/sec to ~32GB/sec. The real world performance implications of this are limited at this time, especially for a card in the 5700 series’ performance segment. But there are situations where it will be useful, particularly on the content creation side of matters.

Finally, AMD has partially updated their display controller. I say “partially” because while it’s technically an update, they aren’t bringing much new to the table. Notably, HDMI 2.1 support isn’t present – nor is more limited support for HDMI 2.1 Variable Rate Refresh. Instead, AMD’s display controller is a lot like Vega’s: DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0b, including support for AMD’s proprietary Freesync-over-HDMI standard. So AMD does have variable rate capabilities for TVs, but it isn’t the HDMI standard’s own implementation.

The one notable change here is support for DisplayPort 1.4 Display Stream Compression. DSC, as implied by the name, compresses the image going out to the monitor to reduce the amount of bandwidth needed. This is important going forward for 4K@144Hz displays, as DP1.4 itself doesn’t provide enough bandwidth for them (leading to other workarounds such as NVIDIA’s 4:2:2 chroma subsampling on G-Sync HDR monitors). This is a feature we’ve talked off and on about for a while, and it’s taken some time for the tech to really get standardized and brought to a point where it’s viable in a consumer product.

AMD Announces Radeon RX 5700 XT & RX 5700 Addendum: AMD Slide Decks
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  • godrilla - Monday, June 10, 2019 - link

    7nm+ fingers crossed.
  • arakan94 - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link

    doesn't DisplayPort DSC solve your problem?
  • mode_13h - Monday, June 10, 2019 - link

    Please be realistic. This would be too soon for AMD to have ray-tracing support.

    In fact, that's probably the reason XBox Next and PS5 aren't launching this year. It takes a long time to design and validate chips, you know? The specs are pretty much baked a couple *years* before launch!
  • Phynaz - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link

    So you are saying AMD is years behind Nvidia.
  • Meteor2 - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link

    Well, yeah. They have fewer resources than either Intel or Nvidia, but are competing with both. As Su says, they’re dependent on bets paying off.
  • arakan94 - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link

    In some areas yes - just as Nvidia was years behind AMD and only finally caught up with original GCN with Pascal. Though not in everything. AMD is still superior in terms of async compute for example.
  • Phynaz - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link

    AMD is superior in a game tech demo from 2013. Yay?
  • Xyler94 - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link

    You know, a GPU is not only for gaming. And unfortunately for AMD, they didn't have the insane R&D money NVIDIA has. Imagine if they did?
  • wumpus - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link

    Nvidia released CUDA back in 2007 when the 8800GTS was king. While AMD might have had GPUs that were better at numerical code since then, nvidia's infrastructure+GPUs made them own the market on GPU computing.

    AMD is good at piggybacking on Intel's infrastructure in the AMD64 market. They have a harder time doing the same with nvidia and the GPU market and the narrow focus of where the money can be spent shows. You'd think they could take some of the lessons learned in making the console GPUs and at least catch up to where nvidia was a couple of years ago but apparently that is too expensive.
  • Korguz - Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - link

    " AMD is good at piggybacking on Intel's infrastructure in the AMD64 market " how did they piggy back intel with amd64 ?

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