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
Radeon is regressing because RDNA 2 was good, and RDNA 3 offers nothing extra on top, if you don't count the extra performance of the 7900 series. The aforementioned chiplet design and dual-issue shaders didn't work out as well as planned. As for Ryzen, I see no regression.
The real risk should have been to delay RDNA 3 and fix the dogcrap they knew it was. Now Su has caused irreparable damage to the Radeon brand. Gamers already had issues trusting the brand to deliver, but this finished it off. And this clamouring surrounding the "amazing" "new" RDNA 4 chips is BS too, as all it is, is a bugfix release of what RDNA 3 was supposed to be in the first place.
RDNA 5 better be amazing, or Radeon will be dead.
Edit: I'm not gonna respond to the "boo hoo Radeon is dead" alarmist BS the rest of your post is. It takes far more than a single mediocre generation to kill a company like AMD.
As for Zen. Well she didn't had too many products back then to choose from. Greenlighting Zen wasn't a brave step or a risk, it was just AMD's last and only chance. It's probably what they should have done with RDNA3. Focus on Raytracing performance because that's where Nvidia is driving the market and the whole marketing narrative. RT performance. And it's probably what they are focusing now, RT performance, because probably SONY asked for it.
This information that AMD will no longer offer graphics cards for the high-end sector is really sad. And it only strengthens my desire to push forward with my old project. Namely the comparison of AMD and Nvidia graphics cards in the enthusiast sector. Of course, graphics card prices are really very expensive at the moment. But of course that is primarily thanks to Nvidia. It was probably predictable that AMD would also join in. Nevertheless, it would have been smarter to reduce the prices by €100 or €150 compared to the Nvidia models. I agree that the two high-end graphics cards from AMD, the 7900 XT and XTX, should have been offered at a lower price when they were introduced. But they have now fallen again. Which of course makes them more attractive compared to the Nvidia graphics cards. You can now get a 7900 XT for around €780. And a 7900 XTX for less than €1000. This of course makes it much more attractive compared to the direct competition from the green camp. In this case, that would be the Nvidia RTX 4080 TI Super and the RTX 4080 Super.
Buy Radeon RX 7600, if you have no clue what to buy :D
But the thing is high end compute performance of AMD GPU is somehow in the same ball park than Nvidia. Their strategy of leveraging compute units for a portion of the work would work if you have way more compute power than your opponent, but it set to fail if you don't have massively more compute power than your opponent.
If RNDA 3 had 192 CU instead of 96, it would have been plenty to perform well against Nvidia in RT while clearly beating Nvidia outside RT. But that chips is probably not doable. Nvidia strategy paid of since they can dedicate a small portion of these chips to RT units that are totally useless outside RT but kicks ass when there is a RT load.
While the RT cores of a nvidia card process the RT workload, the compute units just continue what they were doing. On AMD they have to switch between compute workload and RT workload.
Good to see that AMD is realizing that their strategy is a dead end in a era of very large silicon GPU.
We will see for the release date but later than Q4 would be a miss of opportunities.
Nothing to do with consumers mindset of wanting the latest and greatest despite costs, mainly for bragging rights and Epeen?
Where's the "quality" when Northridgefix stated he's repairing 20 a week due to faults and Nvidia is denying they should have done a recall .
Mind you, it's weird I have to point this out but like, the folks behind NorthridgeFix, NorthwestRepair and similar channels, they may be brilliant technicians, but the key takeaway is that they're still YouTubers and as such, they are after views. It gets people to click when they make thumbnails with insane statements like "The 4090 has a chronic problem AND YOUR CARD WILL DIE!", the only issue with that statement is that it's hyperbole at best and a lie at worst. But it gets you to click on their video, which to their defense, is usually very informative and high quality - the important factor is that it is good for their business (both the channel and new customers for the repair shop). See it for what it is, entertainment value first, informational value second.
But most of them are still very young. And therefore also very receptive to advertising. NVIDIA's marketing department knows this all too well. Constant sensory overload of ray tracing benefits on NVIDIA graphics cards.
They keep up the hype and keep putting new wood in the stove. This does not extinguish the flame of enthusiasm. These people don't even bother to look for alternatives.
And in the end, about 90% of the studios are also approached and paid by NVIDIA. This will optimize their products for NVIDIA cards. But at a few studios, games are also optimized for AMD hardware. The best example here is FarCry 6.
There are various performance tests on the TechPowerUp page. There I did a test where I make a comparison with XTX. In the game FarCry 6 you are ahead. Neither the RTX 4090 nor the Radeon card could be included. Very impressive. If only there were many more studios, AMD hardware would be better supported. Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs. Maybe if the proportion was about 30 or 35%.
AMD cannot afford to pay many studios. But the green camp, yes.
The 7900 series' redemption is their current market price. But they aren't cheap to manufacture, and AMD is selling them with much lower margins than NVIDIA can get on their cards. It's pretty obvious that Navi 31 was intended to compete with AD102, and that never worked out from day one. The current standoff between the 7900 XTX and the 4080 (and 4080 Super) results in a minor victory for AMD in raster performance, with a significant regression in ray tracing performance and power consumption, all while being a much larger and much more complex GPU in itself, that should, on paper, be better at practically everything. But it isn't, nor is the user experience that said card can provide.
Reducing the situation down to "NVIDIA cards sell better because their buyers are young and influenced by marketing" is not the right way to see this.
The x50, x60 and x70 series are historically popular because they've historically been on the top of this chart, not on the bottom, within a stone's throw to the 4090.