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The information available around Big Navi (The GPUs expected to launch next month) put them at a +50% performance jump from the last generation and likely able

The information available around Big Navi (The GPUs expected to launch next month) put them at a +50% performance jump from the last generation and likely able to compete with the Nvidia flagship 3080: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-big_navi-rdna2-all-we-know https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-big_navi-rdna2-all-we-... I'd really urge anyone wanting to opine on these issues to watch the official analyst day videos and read through the releases AMD has put out so far in terms of architecture and other tech decisions they've made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMNwLVJQzGs&t=10064s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMNwLVJQzGs&t=10064s

mbell 6y ago
> The information available around Big Navi (The GPUs expected to launch next month) put them at a +50% performance jump from the last generation and likely able to compete with the Nvidia flagship 3080 I guess it depends on what benchmark you care about but for AMD to compete with a 3080, which is 70-100% faster than a 2080, which is 10-20% faster than AMD's current flagship, they need to do a lot better than +50%.
- strictnein 6y ago
  Some of the leaked benchmarks for the 3080 put it more in the range of 30-50% better than the 2080 series: "30% Faster Than The RTX 2080 Ti & 50% Faster Than the RTX 2080 SUPER on Average" https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-graphics-card-benchmarks-game-performance-leak/ https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-graphics-card-b...
  - tmpz22 6y ago
    AND those early benchmarks were from Nvidia on very specific DLSS and RTX workloads that may not have been representative to many games people play.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      Does it really matter for gaming?
      - zamalek 6y ago
        Disclaimer: I'm personally hoping to complete my current build as a "Red Box" (AMD CPU, AMD GPU). However, facts are facts. DLSS 1.9 was impressive, but has its problems and would understandably be avoided by most gamers. DLSS 2 is a whole different story[1], and is highly likely to be something that most gamers enable. 4K/60 or 1440p/240 are the golden standards for PC gamers (depending on whether you prefer high resolution, or high framerates) and DLSS 2 would help you achieve either. RTX is nice, Minecraft RTX has done a lot for marketing it. Probably still a coin-flip on whether a gamer would eat the performance hit for the quality improvement. [1]: https://youtu.be/YWIKzRhYZm4 https://youtu.be/YWIKzRhYZm4
        throwaway2048 6y ago
        DLSS and RTX are still game specific, with very few games that have developed for them. It has been a generation, if there was going to be a big flood of DLSS and RTX titles, it would have happened already.
        ErneX 6y ago
        RT is here to stay, both next gen consoles have it.
        kllrnohj 6y ago
        > DLSS and RTX are still game specific Note that DLSS 2.0's model is not game specific ( https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-dlss-2-0-a-big-leap-in-ai-rendering/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-dlss-2-0-a-... ) DLSS support is still game specific as it needs additional data beyond just the color buffer to do the up-scaling, such as motion vectors, but it at least doesn't need the expensive part that put it out of reach of eg. indie games. So it's now on the "if unity & unreal support it, you'll see everyone have it in a few years" trajectory. Probably, anyway, similar to things like TXAA & FXAA.
- tmpz22 6y ago
  Depends on price. Nvidia might have owned the tippity top with their 20xx series but the 5700xt was a very strong card for medium priced builds and as a pc building enthusiast would’ve been the card for my next build alongside an amdR5 3600 cpu. At launch it had driver issues but they were cleaned up and at $350 it was a total steal compared to a 2070 at $650 for similar performance.
  - Klinky 6y ago
    I agree. They don't need to beat the 3080, they just need to match or beat the 3070 at a competitive price. I would say the majority of the market does not have $700 to blow on a GPU. Having compelling options under $500 would be enough of a win.
    - kllrnohj 6y ago
      That's what AMD has been doing and it hasn't really worked out. While all the market sales are at the mid range price point, all the youtubers & lust worthy builds that drive mind-share are not. And marketing works, it's why you'll see basically nothing but Nvidia on the steam stats page despite how competitive the 5700 (xt) was. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... The chart toppers are the mid range cards (1060, 1050 Ti, 1050), exactly as you'd expect. But what you then might not expect is that the 1070 and 1080 are both still higher than any AMD offering. There's almost as many 2070 SUPER's ($600) as there are RX 580s ($230 @ launch, currently sub-$200), AMD's most popular GPU among Steam users.
- pbalau 6y ago
  Isn't the Nvidia flagship the RTX 3090? The overclockers uk website has the most expensive 3090 (Asus one) at ~1600gbp. On paper this should destroy everything else available atm.
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    It's also well over $1000. I imagine that's not the competition that AMD is going after this iteration. They probably want to compete with the graphics card people will actually buy.
  - DisjointedHunt 6y ago
    In the kitchen keynote, their CEO positioned the 3080 as the flagship card and the 3090 as the Titan replacement(higher vram for things like large model runs)
- DisjointedHunt 6y ago
  Ah, apologies the linked stories and videos go into more detail. The “50 percent jump” is from Instructions per cycle alone with process node improvements and better cache architecture also contributing gains. Final perf numbers are being speculated as being “close to 3080” in the chip forums, but I’d take that with a grain of salt since those are rumors alone.
red2awn 6y ago
It is important to note that it is 50% performance improvement per watt, not absolute performance.
- derefr 6y ago
  In at least datacenter settings, performance-per-watt is just as important as performance-per-dollar, since watts are continuous OpEx.
  - ziml77 6y ago
    Even in the home, I like to consider performance-per-watt. More power draw means more heat and more heat means less comfort for much of the year.
    - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
      I think you're overestimating the thermal pollution. A human is 100W-120W. The Zen 3 is about 180-220W. That pales to comparison to the cost of cooling a home where air conditioning systems have 36,000BTU or 10,000W.
      - nitrogen 6y ago
        Unless your AC is designed specifically with your PC in mind, and is adequately sized for your house (not a guarantee), a hot, noisy PC or laptop still makes its local area uncomfortable.
        cptskippy 6y ago
        Most homes with central AC have adjustable vents, many have baffles or zones. It's trivial to tweak your airflow to boost cooling to the room with a gaming pc. Ceiling fans are another great option for homogenizing the temperature of a room. You don't need to build your climate control systems specifically with a PC in mind, they're designed to be adjusted.
reitzensteinm 6y ago
But nVidia was substantially ahead the last generation and are promising a greater performance delta than that. AMD often has very high FLOPS but fails to translate that in to FPS in games, due to architecture inefficiency, drivers, or developers simply optimizing primarily for GeForce. I would in turn urge you to take all of these figures with a large grain of salt until the third party benchmarks hit.
- sroussey 6y ago
  AMD’s one saving grace is that to optimize for consoles is to optimize for Radeon.
lagadu 6y ago
+50% performance per watt efficiency. Unfortunately that only puts them at the same efficiency ballpark as nvidia's past two generations.

mbell 6y ago

> The information available around Big Navi (The GPUs expected to launch next month) put them at a +50% performance jump from the last generation and likely able to compete with the Nvidia flagship 3080 I guess it depends on what benchmark you care about but for AMD to compete with a 3080, which is 70-100% faster than a 2080, which is 10-20% faster than AMD's current flagship, they need to do a lot better than +50%.

strictnein 6y ago
Some of the leaked benchmarks for the 3080 put it more in the range of 30-50% better than the 2080 series: "30% Faster Than The RTX 2080 Ti & 50% Faster Than the RTX 2080 SUPER on Average" https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-graphics-card-benchmarks-game-performance-leak/ https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-graphics-card-b...
- tmpz22 6y ago
  AND those early benchmarks were from Nvidia on very specific DLSS and RTX workloads that may not have been representative to many games people play.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Does it really matter for gaming?
    - zamalek 6y ago
      Disclaimer: I'm personally hoping to complete my current build as a "Red Box" (AMD CPU, AMD GPU). However, facts are facts. DLSS 1.9 was impressive, but has its problems and would understandably be avoided by most gamers. DLSS 2 is a whole different story[1], and is highly likely to be something that most gamers enable. 4K/60 or 1440p/240 are the golden standards for PC gamers (depending on whether you prefer high resolution, or high framerates) and DLSS 2 would help you achieve either. RTX is nice, Minecraft RTX has done a lot for marketing it. Probably still a coin-flip on whether a gamer would eat the performance hit for the quality improvement. [1]: https://youtu.be/YWIKzRhYZm4 https://youtu.be/YWIKzRhYZm4
      - throwaway2048 6y ago
        DLSS and RTX are still game specific, with very few games that have developed for them. It has been a generation, if there was going to be a big flood of DLSS and RTX titles, it would have happened already.
        ErneX 6y ago
        RT is here to stay, both next gen consoles have it.
        kllrnohj 6y ago
        > DLSS and RTX are still game specific Note that DLSS 2.0's model is not game specific ( https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-dlss-2-0-a-big-leap-in-ai-rendering/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-dlss-2-0-a-... ) DLSS support is still game specific as it needs additional data beyond just the color buffer to do the up-scaling, such as motion vectors, but it at least doesn't need the expensive part that put it out of reach of eg. indie games. So it's now on the "if unity & unreal support it, you'll see everyone have it in a few years" trajectory. Probably, anyway, similar to things like TXAA & FXAA.
tmpz22 6y ago
Depends on price. Nvidia might have owned the tippity top with their 20xx series but the 5700xt was a very strong card for medium priced builds and as a pc building enthusiast would’ve been the card for my next build alongside an amdR5 3600 cpu. At launch it had driver issues but they were cleaned up and at $350 it was a total steal compared to a 2070 at $650 for similar performance.
- Klinky 6y ago
  I agree. They don't need to beat the 3080, they just need to match or beat the 3070 at a competitive price. I would say the majority of the market does not have $700 to blow on a GPU. Having compelling options under $500 would be enough of a win.
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    That's what AMD has been doing and it hasn't really worked out. While all the market sales are at the mid range price point, all the youtubers & lust worthy builds that drive mind-share are not. And marketing works, it's why you'll see basically nothing but Nvidia on the steam stats page despite how competitive the 5700 (xt) was. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... The chart toppers are the mid range cards (1060, 1050 Ti, 1050), exactly as you'd expect. But what you then might not expect is that the 1070 and 1080 are both still higher than any AMD offering. There's almost as many 2070 SUPER's ($600) as there are RX 580s ($230 @ launch, currently sub-$200), AMD's most popular GPU among Steam users.
pbalau 6y ago
Isn't the Nvidia flagship the RTX 3090? The overclockers uk website has the most expensive 3090 (Asus one) at ~1600gbp. On paper this should destroy everything else available atm.
- t-writescode 6y ago
  It's also well over $1000. I imagine that's not the competition that AMD is going after this iteration. They probably want to compete with the graphics card people will actually buy.
- DisjointedHunt 6y ago
  In the kitchen keynote, their CEO positioned the 3080 as the flagship card and the 3090 as the Titan replacement(higher vram for things like large model runs)
DisjointedHunt 6y ago
Ah, apologies the linked stories and videos go into more detail. The “50 percent jump” is from Instructions per cycle alone with process node improvements and better cache architecture also contributing gains. Final perf numbers are being speculated as being “close to 3080” in the chip forums, but I’d take that with a grain of salt since those are rumors alone.

red2awn 6y ago

It is important to note that it is 50% performance improvement per watt, not absolute performance.

derefr 6y ago
In at least datacenter settings, performance-per-watt is just as important as performance-per-dollar, since watts are continuous OpEx.
- ziml77 6y ago
  Even in the home, I like to consider performance-per-watt. More power draw means more heat and more heat means less comfort for much of the year.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    I think you're overestimating the thermal pollution. A human is 100W-120W. The Zen 3 is about 180-220W. That pales to comparison to the cost of cooling a home where air conditioning systems have 36,000BTU or 10,000W.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      Unless your AC is designed specifically with your PC in mind, and is adequately sized for your house (not a guarantee), a hot, noisy PC or laptop still makes its local area uncomfortable.
      - cptskippy 6y ago
        Most homes with central AC have adjustable vents, many have baffles or zones. It's trivial to tweak your airflow to boost cooling to the room with a gaming pc. Ceiling fans are another great option for homogenizing the temperature of a room. You don't need to build your climate control systems specifically with a PC in mind, they're designed to be adjusted.

reitzensteinm 6y ago

But nVidia was substantially ahead the last generation and are promising a greater performance delta than that. AMD often has very high FLOPS but fails to translate that in to FPS in games, due to architecture inefficiency, drivers, or developers simply optimizing primarily for GeForce. I would in turn urge you to take all of these figures with a large grain of salt until the third party benchmarks hit.

sroussey 6y ago
AMD’s one saving grace is that to optimize for consoles is to optimize for Radeon.

lagadu 6y ago

+50% performance per watt efficiency. Unfortunately that only puts them at the same efficiency ballpark as nvidia's past two generations.