Rumors Point Towards Remarkable Gains for AMD's Upcoming 'Big Navi' GPUs
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:
Rumors Point Towards Remarkable Gains for AMD's Upcoming 'Big Navi' GPUs - ExtremeTech:
There's been a lot of debate in the past 12 months over whether RDNA2 would deliver a huge improvement over RDNA. The Radeon 5700 and 5700 XT were significant leaps forward for AMD's products, but they failed to cleanly beat Turing on absolute power efficiency, and while they challenged Nvidia's RTX GPUs, they weren't enough to deliver knockout blows. RDNA was important because it demonstrated that after years of iterating on GCN, AMD was still capable of delivering significant advances in GPU technology.
AMD raised eyebrows when it claimed RDNA2 would offer a 1.5x performance per watt improvement over RDNA, in the same way RDNA had improved dramatically over GCN. Generally speaking, such dramatic improvements only come from node shrinks, not additional GPUs built on the same node. Nvidia's Maxwell is probably the best example of a GPU family that improved over its predecessor without a node change, and the gap between Maxwell and Kepler was smaller than the gap between Pascal and Maxwell, as far as power efficiency improvements and performance gains.
There are rumors going around that Big Navi might [be] dramatically faster than expected, with performance estimated at 1.95x - 2.25x higher than the 5700 XT. This would be an astonishing feat, to put it mildly. The slideshow below shows our test results from the 5700 XT and 5700. The 5700 XT matched the RTX 2070 (and sometimes the 2080) well, while the 5700 was modestly faster than the RTX 2060 for a slightly higher price. A 1.95 - 2.25x speed improvement would catapult Big Navi into playable frame rates even on the most demanding settings we test; 18fps in Metro Exodus at Extreme Detail and 4K becomes 35-41 fps depending on which multiplier you choose. I have no idea how Big Navi would compare against Ampere at that point, but it would handily blow past the RTX 2080 Ti.
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