68 PCWorld AUGUST 2019REVIEWS AMD RADEON RX 5700 AND 5700 XT
support for VP9 decoding, and both encoding
and decoding with H.264 or H.265.
You’ll notice two glaring omissions from
this rundown of upgrades: support for ray
tracing and variable rate pixel shading (go.
pcworld.com/vrps), both of which were
introduced in Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 20-series,
and both of which were embraced
(agnostically) by Windows 10’s DirectX 12.
You can hear Herkelman explain why AMD
made the decision to omit dedicated ray-
tracing hardware from the Radeon RX 5700
series at the 39:20 mark in the video interview
near the top of this article. Quick tl;dr: AMD
will enable ray tracing when there are more
games available that support it, and when the
performance hit becomes less drastic. “Don’t
get me wrong: It is definitely the future,” he
says. “But it needs to be done right.”
That’s it for the hardware side of things.
But AMD’s latest graphics cards pack some
new software tricks, too.RADEON SOFTWARE
IMPROVEMENTS
AMD gave Radeon Software a huge overhaul
in December, but it’s adding some new
features for the Radeon RX 5700 series
release. Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019
Edition version 19.7.1 (phew!) will go live
alongside the release of the new hardware.
While time constraints prevented us from
giving these fresh goodies a test drive ahead
of this review, they’re worth highlighting.Radeon Anti-Lag
Radeon Anti-Lag was created to make esports
gamers more competitive by, well, reducing
input lag when you click your mouse. In
GPU-bound scenarios (like esports), AMD
says the CPU registers clicks at least one frame
ahead of the GPU, and the GPU then renders
the response on-screen, resulting in a delay of
at least two frames, or 33.3 milliseconds at
60 fps. “Radeon Anti-Lag dynamically
improves the pacing
of the CPU work,
allowing the CPU
work to overlap a
significant portion of
the GPU work, so the
CPU doesn’t get too
far ahead of the
GPU.” That can
bring the delay back
down to a single
frame, or 16.7