Unknown Soldier
Member
Well, there it is. This is only a rumor but it’s the first one so far about Big Navi. Let’s be absolutely honest, we still know next to nothing about Big Navi as AMD has been pretty mum but the fact that they had absolutely nothing to say about the RTX 3000 series announcement event other than “Ryzen CPU’s go well with them” is probably not a good sign. The word going around in the industry now is that AMD is quietly signaling to board partners to expect around 3070 performance from Big Navi, and that they are unable to use GDDR6X because that was a joint Nvidia-Micron project so Big Navi will be paired with just GDDR6.
To be quite frank, this was expected. AMD was already rumored to be planning on being around or better than 2080 Ti performance with Big Navi, and that’s exactly the performance Nvidia is promising from 3070. It looks like the 3080 will be untouchable, to say nothing of the monster that is the 3090. AMD fans should be used to no competition with Nvidia on the high end though, as the last AMD GPU which actually competed with Nvidia at the very top end was the 290X back in 2013.
The other issue is that AMD doesn’t seem to have dedicated tensor cores in RDNA2, instead relying on the compute cores to help enable ray tracing if reports of how PS5 and XSeX implement RT are to be believed. If so RT throughput will be significantly reduced compared to Ampere, and while Big Navi may be competitive with 3070 in traditional rasterization, it will likely be completely unable to keep up in ray tracing.
Also, no DLSS on Big Navi is going to make things very rough in games which have DLSS enabled but that’s another story for another day.