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
maybe both surprise us but who am i kidding.
4070 like will get you 60fps 4k in most games no issue with dlss quality 80 ish fps. Optimized settings on top and you are good to go.
There's limited fab capacity (see Nvidia right now where there's scarcity of any large dies right now for the gaming market), and AMD can make bank on CDNA where it is competitive rather than trying to compete in the high end, where mindshare is firmly in Nvidia's camp, and of which they have an architecture simply not built to scale to as high a die space as Nvidia's (and is still wanting for their MCM GPU approach to become viable).
Most of us should be excited, a high performing card for cheap? That is sorely missing from today's market.
In that case, even if AMD doesn't compete in the top end, it should push down most GPU prices significantly, which people buy anyway.
Also, nothing is stopping AMD from making a larger GPU, slapping on more CUs
I *can* see dropping the high-end as a sensible option for AMD - their bread-and-butter is custom silicon for consoles and the surge of new handhelds that have hit the market. Having their desktop product stack be something that can also go into consoles and handhelds is far more relevant to them in terms of profit and market penetration, and the lower half of the RDNA2/RDNA3 product stack seems to have been selling well.
Flagships are nice and all, but the battle for flagship dominance is going to be won by Nvidia until AMD invest more heavily into raytracing - and honestly, even on Nvidia's 3rd generation of RTX cards, we're still at a point where half of the Nvidia product stack (accounting for 90%+ of their actual units sold) is too weak for acceptable raytracing/path-tracing performance in the extremely small list of games that make heavy use of it like CP2077/Alan Wake 2/Ratchet & Clank. RTX 3080/4070 and up is kind of where you need to be for 1080p60 raytracing in those games (or higher resolutions with DLSS). For AMD to beat a 4090 they need to more-than-double their raytracing performance, and that's wasted effort for anything slower than a 3080/4070. In other words, the 7800XT is the slowest card that could conceivably see the benefits of improved raytracing efforts and the vast majority of what AMD sells isn't at the performance tier where it matters (yet).
If they agreed with the rules of the game, then please be so kind and play the game, or exit it. Who says that they will buy nvidia instead! That's a speculation on your side. Very wrong.
This is representative of the general public mindshare. "Nvidia = gaming, AMD = second place."
Or they can just buy lower res monitor or play lower settings.
its good to be a Nvidia user, there is no morale problems to buy High end Gpu in future.
And I'm talking totally enjoyable VS barely playable, not garbage VS complete garbage:
I don't mind RDNA4 GPUs being unimpressive at pure raster (RDNA3 GPUs are already not impressive due to discounts on NV production and the way the UE5 treats this architecture). I don't mind them having no top-tier SKU (AMD have never had competed with NV's halos with any success anyway). What I do mind is the same performance drop when it comes to RT. So if a 500 dollar RDNA4 GPU fails to outpace the 7900 XT in pure raster it's bad but acceptably bad. But if it also fails to outperform it in RT it's a terrible release.
People are going straight to 11 on this brainfart, its amazing. Sheeple
On Nvidia lots of things are playable for most while they aren't on AMD if that's how you want to argue. Relative performance is just much worse for AMD.
It's also not like you can escape RT as we're already seeing games where RT is default or where raster has broken lightning because it was developed with RT in mind. Hell, even one of the latest AMD sponsored games has mandatory RT.
NB: Outselling the 7600 XT is not an achievement. The only barely competitive GPUs are 7800 XT and, to a lesser extent, 7900 XTX. Other RDNA3 GPUs are currently seriously overpriced.
Most of all though economically it makes zero sense for AMD to stop at the mid-range. AMD can add or subtract chiplets from a design at a near linear cost. This is particularly pertinent because for Nvidia the cost increase is exponential at the high end due to fact that yield drastically decreases when you get to the size of a high end GPU. By extension this means AMD has a large cost advantage in the high end (not that it really needs it given Nvidia's margins have always been large on those high end cards). AMD might not compete with Nvidia's high end chip with a single GCD but at the very least I'd expect them to stack up as many chiplets to have a competitive high end product simply because that's what stands to make them the most money. There's really no reason for AMD to simply leave money on the table.
In the real world the average is 20-30%, I don't have the patience to get into the discussion about RT again. I'll summarize by saying that I think it's a waste of resources in every way.
Nvidia having no competition for the 4090 is why it's $2000 compared the 4080S at $1000. If AMD had a 7950XTX that was just 10% faster than the 7900XTX, the 4090 would adjust slightly. It would adjust more if there wasn't a CUDA-dependent AI market to serve, too. I'm not surprised at all:
- The 4070 Ti Super is better value than its predecessor and brings a sensible amount of VRAM to the price point for the first time in a long while.
- The 7600XT is worse than either of it predecessors. It's too expensive and power-hungry to compete with the 7600 8GB and it's inferior in every metric to the identically-priced 6700XT.
I have no idea how well the 4070 Ti Super is selling, but they could be selling disastrously AND also be outselling the 7600XT 9:1 at the same time. The two statements are not mutually-exclusive! An AMD GPU that does sell well is the RX 6600 at €209, offering plenty of 1080p performance for 40% less money. Until that becomes unavailable, it's still the best-value sub-$300 card and if you want more performance than it offers, the next options worth looking at are the 4060Ti or 6700XT.If they could make a GPU with 2GCD, each performing as 7900XTX, with MCDs on them, improve RT perf then I would sell my 7900XTX and buy it instantly.
EDIT
Did a read up on that Instinct card:
chipsandcheese.com/2023/12/17/amds-cdna-3-compute-architecture/
It uses XCDs and has eight of them and they are all exposed as a single GPU.
Question is does it convert to consumer market and a GPU used for gaming, we'll see I guess.