Monday, January 29th 2024
Top AMD RDNA4 Part Could Offer RX 7900 XTX Performance at Half its Price and Lower Power
We've known since way back in August 2023, that AMD is rumored to be retreating from the enthusiast graphics segment with its next-generation RDNA 4 graphics architecture, which means that we likely won't see successors to the RX 7900 series squaring off against the upper end of NVIDIA's fastest GeForce RTX "Blackwell" series. What we'll get instead is a product stack closely resembling that of the RX 5000 series RDNA, with its top part providing a highly competitive price-performance mix around the $400-mark. A more recent report by Moore's Law is Dead sheds more light on this part.
Apparently, the top Radeon RX SKU based on the next-gen RDNA4 graphics architecture will offer performance comparable to that of the current RX 7900 XTX, but at less than half its price (around the $400 mark). It is also expected to achieve this performance target using a smaller, simpler silicon, with significantly lower board cost, leading up to its price. What's more, there could be energy efficiency gains made from the switch to a newer 4 nm-class foundry node and the RDNA4 architecture itself; which could achieve its performance target using fewer numbers of compute units than the RX 7900 XTX with its 96.When it came out, the RX 5700 XT offered an interesting performance proposition, beating the RTX 2070, and forcing NVIDIA to refresh its product stack with the RTX 20-series SUPER, and the resulting RTX 2070 SUPER. Things could go down slightly differently with RDNA4. Back in 2019, ray tracing was a novelty, and AMD could surprise NVIDIA in the performance segment even without it. There is no such advantage now, ray tracing is relevant; and so AMD could count on timing its launch before the Q4-2024 debut of the RTX 50-series "Blackwell."
Sources:
Moore's Law is Dead (YouTube), Tweaktown
Apparently, the top Radeon RX SKU based on the next-gen RDNA4 graphics architecture will offer performance comparable to that of the current RX 7900 XTX, but at less than half its price (around the $400 mark). It is also expected to achieve this performance target using a smaller, simpler silicon, with significantly lower board cost, leading up to its price. What's more, there could be energy efficiency gains made from the switch to a newer 4 nm-class foundry node and the RDNA4 architecture itself; which could achieve its performance target using fewer numbers of compute units than the RX 7900 XTX with its 96.When it came out, the RX 5700 XT offered an interesting performance proposition, beating the RTX 2070, and forcing NVIDIA to refresh its product stack with the RTX 20-series SUPER, and the resulting RTX 2070 SUPER. Things could go down slightly differently with RDNA4. Back in 2019, ray tracing was a novelty, and AMD could surprise NVIDIA in the performance segment even without it. There is no such advantage now, ray tracing is relevant; and so AMD could count on timing its launch before the Q4-2024 debut of the RTX 50-series "Blackwell."
396 Comments on Top AMD RDNA4 Part Could Offer RX 7900 XTX Performance at Half its Price and Lower Power
Considering that even the 6700 XT was a 230 W GPU, I'm not complaining as long as there is a nice performance bump.
Amd/comments/1517zvy
Just saying to ignore the AMD settings, because they are mostly wrong.
As a 6800XT owner a middling uplift for the flagship needs to have solid markers for me to want to move.
I know it's likely to be a pipe dream (simply because nvidia might decide not to raise the bar)
But I want 7900XTX raster, 4080 super RTX (or at least a decent uplift in RTX performance), power sipping close to or better than what's on offer and cheaper than current offerings.
I feel like they might tick 2 of the boxes, and I would forgo the want of RTX uplift if we were getting a jump in raster but it 'seems' safe to say we're not even raising the raster bar at all.
Either the monolithic Navi33 is a lie, and is just a rebrand of RDNA's Navi23 with AV1 bolted on, or RDNA3 really is useless with a truly-zero architectural improvement.
So when leaks say Navi48 *could* offer 7900XTX performance, that means it either needs to run at 4GHz, or AMD need to have made a 50% IPC improvement between RDNA3 and RDNA4. I'm a realist so I'm honestly expecting Navi48 to run at 2.8-3.0GHz thanks to a new node and RDNA4 to have a 10-15% IPC improvement. That's good for maybe 7900XT performance.
Hopefully I'm wrong. I'd love to be wrong and for these >30% performance/$ claims to pan out!
I also think Raja screwed AMD and blew a fortune on second-rate chip designers and have left AMD with an architecture that's impossibly expensive to fix and or to scale up passed where it was 24 months ago. This would also explain the awful performance of their "next gen" RDNA4 architecture, which will at best catch up with nGreedias current gen, just not the 4090. And yes raster perf, blah blah, but that's not where the market is going. nGreedia have won the RT war, and more and more games will use it, especially as Sony is going to push it hard with the PS5 refresh. For AMD to have sub-par RT perf with RDNA4 in 2025/6 would be a disaster for them, so let's hope they at least get that right!
At the moment AMD are nearly two generations behind nGreedia. A position I don't think they can come back from, as far as the high-end gaming market is concerned, unless they can match or beat the 4090 perf with RT for substantially less money. They will be battling nGreedias bottom to mid-range 50x0 series with RDNA4, and Intels Battlemage cards, which could possibly outperform all but AMD's highest end cards, for less money!
Let's end by hoping AMD are majorly sandbagging RDNA4 for the last 12 months, and that there will be a performance variant of the chip which takes them way past the 4090.
AMD needs to double the RT cores and/or make them much beefier in order to match nvidia's ray-traced performance.
I don't think it's that dificult, not to say impossible.
Maybe AMD decided to cancel the RDNA projects and start from scratch on a brand new architecture with ray-tracing in its core.
I don't anticipate any significant improvements to the compiler and we don't know enough about RDNA 4 to determine if it would increase the IPC of each compute unit. Cautious pessimism seems to be the prudent option and that would suggest that almost all of the improvement will be the result of higher clock speeds and more compute units.
AMD needs to give us the RX 7800 XT level of performance for 200$. That will be revolutionary and will make the thing sell like no tomorrow/hot cakes.
7800XT with a 30% improvement in performance/$ is another way of saying $499 * 1/1.3, which is $385, which they'll "round up" to $399, and then only the base models will cost that, with fancy versions like the TUF and Nitro+ costing $450.
As always, paying for an overbuilt cooler is worse value the cheaper your base product becomes, so on a $399 part, you REALLY want be looking for the best-quality $399 card. There's absolutely no way a slightly quieter cooler is worth an extra 13% when the MSRP models usually include a couple of high-quality, very quiet editions. You can usually count on Asus and Sapphire to make a Dual/Pulse that doesn't suck.
You say RX 8800 XT (RX 7800 XT +30%) ~400$.
Would not be disastrously bad, but still nothing special and I don't think it will motivate the sales much.
I don't think it will reach that performance. I am more inclined to believe RX 7800 XT +-5%.
I don't expect AMD to release anything beyond 25 percent better bang per buck compared to RDNA3 in RDNA4. And honestly, Intel's upcoming generation is more promising. But "7900 XTX performance at 500 USD and below 350 W" is what we need now for competition to become a thing but we'll never get until that becomes a given in NVIDIA's SKUs.
x.com/Kepler_L2/status/1809317008930177339
Su has shown from it's first days at AMD that she will cancel, put on hold or at least downgrade it to a non priority any product line that doesn't bring money to the company. If consumers and press only want Nvidia, that's what they will get.
There is nothing wrong in the Radeon brand, it's just that Su is incompetent, and can't produce something faster than a GeForce.
I mean how else can you describe someone saying that regulators should fine the company that commands just 10% of the market, helping the company that commands more than 80% of the market to become even a bigger monopoly? And why he posts something like that? Because he wants "AMD to build something very cheap, to force Nvidia to drop prices, so he can go and buy cheaper Nvidia hardware".
Well,
unfortunately he will have to wait a few years for Intel to become a competitor in the enthusiast segment.AMD needs driver stability, comprehensive API support including "optionals" (their lack of DX11 command lists support has been an unforgivable blemish for many) new, exciting and more importantly, working features that don't look like cheap clones of superior NVIDIA techs, proper SDKs for said features, and to present the user with a KISS mentality. Right now, they play catch up and refresh the control panel about once a year. Only then will they achieve what Radeon is truly missing: an excellent user experience. This is why NV cards are popular, they work, and the work well.
I agree with your first paragraph, though. I'd rather RDNA 4 be late than bad. I really hope they'll manage to fix the idle power issues seen on RDNA 3.