AMD’s next-gen graphics cards should beat Nvidia by using a lengthy way when it comes to efficiency, and might also additionally be proper up there in overall performance terms, in accordance to clean speculation from a usual hardware leaker on YouTube – however Team Green may beat Team Red to the punch in terms of the release date.
The latest video from Moore’s Law is Dead (MLID) covers the upcoming battle of these next-gen GPUs, and emphasizes the purportedly smart design of AMD’s RDNA 3 products, and how they would possibly run rings around Nvidia in terms of power efficiency.
What will possibly be AMD’s RX 7000 series are predicted to be very frugal and can also “blow Lovelace out of the water” when it comes to efficiency, and should match or maybe even marginally outdo Nvidia for overall performance as well, MLID reckons.
That said, the assertions on the performance front certainly sound much more in the realms of speculation, and as ever with these kinds of early rumors, we’ve got to be pretty cautious around everything talked about here.
Where Nvidia has a clear advantage, MLID believes, is in launch timing, as the currently educated guesswork from sources indicates that Lovelace (presumably RTX 4000) graphics cards will be out in Q3 2022. That should be a distance ahead of RDNA 3 products which will likely emerge in Q4 (though the leaker reckons that there’s a possibility that mid-range RX 7000 models, namely Navi 33 GPUs, could maybe sneak out before the fourth quarter).
Broadly, though, MLID is looking at Nvidia beating AMD to the punch for the launch timeframe.
Analysis: Is this AMD’s big move to grab some serious desktop GPU turf?
RDNA 3 graphics cards running with greater levels of efficiency is hardly a surprise, but the theory that they’ll absolutely leave Nvidia Lovelace GPUs in the dust is not something we’ve heard before. That would be quite a win for Team Red, and admittedly we have witnessed a string of worrying rumors about exactly how power-hungry Nvidia’s next-gen graphics products might be.
This is necessary for particular at the higher-end, as if Nvidia’s cards really do make some punishing needs on the power front, it should mean gamers are searching at a PSU upgrade – and as a substitute then go that route, if RX 7000 GPUs are indeed way extra power-efficient, prospective buyers may change their minds and go Team Red.
It’s additionally interesting to hear MLID express some cynicism round some of the rumors which have been peddled earlier than about Nvidia Lovelace GPUs promising extra than double the overall performance of current Ampere cards – such as the declaration that the RTX 4090 should provide approaching triple the performance of the existing Nvidia flagship.
The leaker puts ahead of the view that these sorts of estimations are overblown, and that whilst these different predictions of doubling performance are possible, they’d require Nvidia to push power consumption massively (as is rumored, to be fair, as we already mentioned). MLID certainly believes Lovelace will represent a greater generational overall performance increase than Ampere was once over Turing, and that it’ll be impressive, however, it may want to be extra like a 60% to 80% gain alternatively than an outright doubling.
This idea that some rumor mongers may additionally have exaggerated Lovelace’s overall performance increase is partly the purpose for MLID’s line of the idea that AMD’s RDNA 3 cards will be competitive in terms of raw frame rates (as properly as imparting much higher efficiency).
So, there would show up to reasons for Nvidia to fret about how the next-gen GPU war is shaping up, and it’s additionally really worth mentioning that RX 7000 graphics cards arriving later can also be in part wrapped up in AMD trying to make certain supply is stronger this time around. The argument is that this would possibly be Team Red’s chance to virtually get back into the game, and push its desktop GPU market share up from around the 20% mark to something more substantial.
Nvidia being out until now though, in the idea – and with Team Green additionally upping availability, as greatly speaking, all GPU stock levels are expected to get much higher as 2022 rolls onwards – will nonetheless be a large advantage, and we shouldn’t get carried away with speculation on how properly things may go for AMD.
This is simply speculation, after all, and the equation of how the GPU hostilities pan out has some other component for consideration, too – particularly Intel’s entry into the market with Arc Alchemist cards and how that affects the balance of power. In short, there’s a lot of road to travel but for 2022, however, certainly these latest whispers from the grapevine won’t be comforting for dominant desktop power Nvidia.
AMD RDNA 3: cut to the chase
- What is it? AMD’s next-gen GPU architectures following up the Radeon RX 6000 Series.
- When is it out? As soon as the end of 2022
- What will it cost? Anywhere from $400 to $2,000+
AMD RDNA 3 release date
There’s no confirmed date for the release of AMD RDNA 3 graphics cards, but there’s good reason to believe the first few models will come out at the end of this year.
AMD RDNA 3 price
We have little basis for guessing at the prices of AMD’s RDNA 3 graphics card. Logically, the new GPUs — Navi 31, 32, and 33 — will be the successors to the Navi 21 found in the $999 Radeon RX 6900 XT and $649 RX 6800 XT, Navi 22 found in the $479 RX 6700 XT, and Navi 23 found in the $379 RX 6600 XT, respectively.
Given supply chain and logistics issues over the past two years that are still causing problems, as well as TSMC’s possible price hikes for chip fabrication, we’re sure that we’ll be seeing Radeon RX 7000 Series graphics cards that are more expensive than their predecessors.
With that in mind, RedGamingTech has suggested the top-end model may be set up to be a true beast and could cost over $2,000.
AMD RDNA 3 specs and performance
There’s little more to go on than whispers and rumors when it comes to the specs of RDNA 3-based graphics cards, but those that we’ve heard suggest some powerful chips that are going to be borrowing a key page out of AMD’s Ryzen CPU playbook.
One of the first things to understand about RDNA 3 is that it’s going to make another shift away from how some of the components are understood with previous architectures. With RDNA 2, the chip contained a number of shader engines, which in turn contained a host of dual compute units loaded with stream processors, texture units, and ray accelerator units.
Navi 32 would in turn have 40 workgroup processors, 12GB of GDDR6 on a 192-bit bus, have 192MB of 3D Infinity Cache, and run between 2.6 and 2.8GHz.
Navi 33 drops down to 16 workgroup processors, 8GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus, 64MB of Infinity Cache, and clocks between 2.8 and 3.0GHz.
To put this in some more perspective, Navi 31 would have the previously mentioned 15,360 stream processors, Navi 32 would hit 10,240, and Navi 31 would boast 4,096 (within striking distance of the number in the Radeon 6900 XT).
How does that stand up against the latest and greatest cards currently on the market? The Radeon RX 6900 XT boasts 23.04 TFLOPS of FP32 performance and the RTX 3090 offers 35.7 TFLOPS. In other words, RDNA 3 chips could be bringing some serious heat to even Nvidia’s best, unless the RTX 4090 is as fast as a rumor.
