I'm pessimistic when it comes to AMD claims. All of the "RDNA3" IPC improvements were thoroughly tested by dozens of independent reviewers once the 7600 came out and could be directly compared to the 6650XT. When you clock the core and memory to the same speeds, there's a big fat zero.
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!
Totally agree. I said so at the time when it came to light RDNA3 was hot and low performance that something had gone very wrong, or we have been lied to. What makes me think the chip is some kind of lie is that AMD never fixed it, and if it was some simple chip errata then surely they would have done a re-spin and used it to kick nGreedias arse by now and used the old, broken chip to launch a low-end range with reduced speed and lower thermals.
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.
