AMD claims high-end Big Navi Radeon GPUs leave Nvidia's ray-tracing cards in the dust
- Reference: 1603971908
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/10/29/amds_radeon_gpus/
- Source link:
If you missed CEO Lisa Su's presentation, you can catch it below. In the short but sweet video, Su holds up a square metal-encased chip.
[1]
Lisa Su shows off Big Navi. Source: AMD
"Today is all about the 'Big Navi'," she said, referring to the company's 7nm TSMC-fabricated die. The GPU is at the heart of AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series, which comes in three configurations: RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT, and the more basic RX 6800.
[2]Youtube Video
They all have the same PCIe 4.0 technology, 16GB of onboard GDDR6 memory and have 128MB of cache memory, but different amounts of compute units and clock speeds.
RX 6900 XT is AMD's most powerful GPU to date with 80 compute units, 300W of power, and up to 2,015MHz of game clock speed. Designed to go neck and neck with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090 chip, AMD said its RX 6900 XT was able to render more frames per second at 4K than its competitor in some of the most popular titles, like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Battlefield V . It costs $999 (~£769) and is expected to be released on 8 December.
RX 6800 XT is pretty much identical to the RX 6900 XT, except it has 72 compute units instead of 80. The frames per second rate is pretty comparable and often exceeds Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 for top games in 4K and 1440p quality. Buyers will have to wait until 18 November to get their hands on AMD's mid-range option and be prepared to fork out $649 (~£500).
[3]RX 6800 has 60 compute units, 250W of power, and a game clock speed of 1,815MHz. It's a bit more difficult to see how this one stacks up against Nvidia's lower-end [4]GeForce RTX 3070 , however, since AMD only provided comparisons against the 2080Ti, Nvidia's previous generation of GPUs.
All three Navi-based GPUs support the latest RDNA2 microarchitecture to accelerate ray-tracing and shading features needed to render pixels. Su said that RDNA2 offers a boost of about 50 per cent performance per watt compared to its previous RDNA architecture.
Laura Smith, AMD's senior director of Radeon Technologies Group, said RDNA2 provides 2.17X more bandwidth to support 4K gaming, a power increase of 0.9X, and 30 per cent more frequency.
RDNA2 has new features, including the ominously named Rage Mode to provide an extra boost of performance when its GPUs start to overclock as well as Smart Access Memory.
"It gives AMD Ryzen processors greater access to the high-speed GDDR6 graphics memory, accelerating CPU processing," AMD [5]said . ®
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[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/10/29/lisa_su1.jpg
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHpgu-cTjyM&feature=emb_title
[3] https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/amd-radeon-rx-6800
[4] https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/graphics-cards/30-series/rtx-3070/
[5] https://www.amd.com/en/press-releases/2020-10-28-amd-unveils-next-generation-pc-gaming-amd-radeon-rx-6000-series-bringing
[6] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
"... drivers any good these days?"
FWIW, on Linux they're better than ever (remember, FWIW), but I'm not sure on Windows or when the hardware is at full tilt under any OS :-/ (multiple displays suck, but they do everywhere so...)
Considering AMD is trying to break into "AI", already has laptops as well as game consoles, I don't think AMD cares about desktop GPU or at best they simply see it as a testing/research platform. Of course with Nvidia's purchase of ARM, I'm not too sure how long Nvidia will care about desktop GPU either (it kind of looks like Nvidia wants to become AMD). Who knows, but I do wonder what the percentage of sales is for any companies desktop GPU's and would it be noticed if it was lost.
on Linux they're better than ever
That's not a very high bar...
That's not a very high bar...
Got to be better than my Desktop experience with Nvidia.
After several years, Wayland is still unreachable, the Plasma desktop is flitchy as hell.
Really a step back from my last build, despite a discrete graphics card this build vs. an onboard chip on last (AMD), and it was pre-amdgpu driver.
If remotely true ...
this is going to be big ! NV will have to be worried and it may explain their "back to sanity" pricing strategy.
Hopefully, as stated above, the drivers will be good. I see not reason why not, but still.
A proprietary ~7%.
I think the article should of mentioned or maybe even highlighted the proprietary angle of CPU+GPU. Or maybe not I guess, maybe everyone is stumped on why you would want your CPU to directly access the memory of the GPU (and can't it already?). I see the advantages, but they seem slight to me to the point where I'm wondering why you wouldn't just use some ASIC and throw in more system RAM. Whatever, this is still a proprietary full stack move that kind of mimics the NVidia "GSync" crap and to gamers an extra ~7% "performance" is a lot (of course 7% of what we'll have to wait to see).
Re: A proprietary ~7%.
If you make both the CPU and the GPU, why would you NOT want them to work better together? It's not like the GPU won't work well enough with Intel, it's just that you get a slight performance boost when paired with their own 5000 series chips. I honestly don't see the problem there. It's no different to Apple making both the hardware and the software, and people wondering why iOS runs so well on less memory than Android equivalents.
Re: A proprietary ~7%.
There is an advantage to go AMD on CPU and GPU, probably developed as part of their console work. I am sure AMD will licence the tech to Intel if it wants it as they both have with other technologies, but to be honest if you have an Intel platform you are going to lose out anyway as Intel has yet to provide support for PCI 4, and will likely do that just in time for PCI 5 from AMD.
Intel have been cruising for the last few years as they tried to get their next node up and running.
They are about to release their own discrete graphics cards which will be built on a 3rd parties node not their own.
If you were building a new gaming system now, I don't see anything compelling in buying anything Intel and an all AMD package would make sense. For some specific use cases you could make a case for Intel but that is an ever shrinking pool, not even cost would make the case.
But will you actually be able to buy one? I gave up and cancelled my 3080 preorder after a few weeks. I'm expecting demand for these cards to far outstrip supply as everyone frustrated with NVIDIA will want one! Decided just to get a refurbished 2070S for now and maybe upgrade next year when supply evens out and we know more about the true comparison of these cards
That's a big if, indeed.
AMD did send out a letter to resellers "urging them" to put in place provisions to weed out bots and restrict order counts so that people at least have the chance to get one. Whether or not they will, time will tell.
Lately, availability has been a recurring problem with AMD
I'm still waiting for Ryzen 4800U availability for my next laptop - they were announced in July but, although Lenovo has publicized the Yoga Slim 7 equipped with one, that version is nowhere to be seen - or anyone else's, for the matter.
Point of order though on the headline:
The AMD cards are pretty much matching NVidia for performance apart from the 6090XT which, with some of their additional provisions, looks to beat the 3090 in gaming workloads. It's not mind blowing but (apart from raw ray tracing performance) they seem to have taken back the performance crown. AMDs cards to score a plus with a significantly lower power draw as well.
The interesting difference for me is the segmentation of the models. All of them are pretty much the same as regards their "infinity cache", main memory size and form factor. The big differentiator seems to be the number of CUs.
A lot of people will be disappointed that there isn't a budget model for those with a more realistic bank account.
I thought about this a bit and it may well be that they anticipate a flood of used cards hitting the market (e.g. 5700 from them, 1080/1070/1060s from NVidia) and they wouldn't like to compete against those. No doubt they are still smarting over the ex-mining glut some time ago where they allegedly couldn't shift new stock.
That's all very well, but are their drivers any good these days? And do they still ship that god-awful control panel that looks like something designed by a five year old with an unlimited supply of crayons?