AMD Navi 20 GPU Allegedly Supports Ray Tracing & Enhanced GCN Architecture - May Be Faster Than RTX 2080 Ti

[Guest]

Great work AMD! Another proud American company doing well in these times. We have a BOOMING economy. #MakeTechGreatAgain. 

[dalekphalm]

I've always been a fan of AMD. And I fully own and admit that during the "olden days" (Athlon XP, Radeon 6000 and 7000 series, etc), I was a full blown AMD fanboy. Times have changed, but I still have a fondness in my heart for them.

 

With that in mind, I will believe it when I see it. Too many times rumours have come out about how Polaris will wreck the top NVIDIA GPU. Oh wait no, it was Vega that'll wreck the top NVIDIA GPU.

 

Time and time again, it has shown to be incorrect. I strongly wish I'm incorrect here, as an actual flagship GPU from AMD would be fucking siiiiiiiick.

 

AMD: I challenge you to prove me wrong. Make Navi 20 a showstopper.

[Humbug]

From what I heard Navi20 will only come out next year in 2020, not this year. So 2080ti perfromance expectations do not suprise me at all since this will be a big high end GPU. Nvidia's next gen ampere will also come out in 2020 so AMD needs to compete with That, not the 2080ti.

 

What matters this year is the mainstream navi10 and we need to make push for mainstream level pc gaming to become more affordable again. Or else iF AMD does not compete then on the long-term Nvidia's current tactic of ridiculous price escalation every generation is gonna push lots of people away from PC gaming towards consoles and the cloud.

[Billy Pilgrim]

1 hour ago, valdyrgramr said:

We honestly don't know if it's coming out this year or next, though.  We heard a delay, but not for when exactly.  AMD won't speak about Navi, so it's all speculation of how this is going to go about.  They won't even tell us more about Zen 2.

This could be either because they don't want to show other companies their hand, or because they are frantically trying to get their crap together and are not sure about this themselves.

[dalekphalm]

1 hour ago, Bcat00 said:

does history not show that crappy company can’t roll out a decent GPU for the past decade?

I challenge this assertion for accuracy. One could argue that their recent GPU's haven't been stellar, but point in fact:

 

GCN 1 (Radeon 7000 series "Southern Islands") was a fucking kickasssssss GPU architecture. It went toe to toe against the best NVIDIA had to offer at the time, and in most cases, tied or won. GCN 1 is 7 years old. 7 years is less than a decade. A decade ago would be "Evergreen" (Radeon 5000 series) which was a decent (though not exceptional) architecture too.

1 hour ago, valdyrgramr said:

Ya, but not everyone cares about power consumption.  Vega sold well based on competition.  Vega FEs alone sold fast to content creators and people doing other forms of pro work.  AMD profited well off Vega rather you like it or not.

The funny thing is that nobody ever gave a shit about power consumption until NVIDIA started marketing around it with the GTX 700/900 series cards. Like, in older reviews it was measured, sure, but hardly anyone cared, and a hungry card was simply not a big deal.

 

Now, with that in mind, more power efficient is definitely better, but it's certainly not the be-all-end-all of GPU's.

[poochyena]

Navi rumored to cure cancer and end child poverty.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

1 hour ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

They say faster, but in what context? With what tests?

I believe the test is called "marketing coloured bars". There is a red bar, and there's a green bar, and the red one is taller.

[MoonSpot]

2 hours ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

They say faster, but in what context? With what tests?

Obviously its on the More-Betterer scale, so there's your context.  Which test is an interesting question.  Given recent past similar situations from amd/radeon; I think its safe to assume its a singular test that we've never heard of before, whos lead programmer we'll feel compelled to later comment how their software wasn't designed to be used as a test in such situations.

[pas008]

10 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

I think it might be more due to delays and the fact that AMD is currently focusing more on the pro side than the gamer side as usual.  AMD is focusing more on pushing out pro stuff right now with gamers as a secondary focus.  We know more about Vega 20, TR Gen 3, and Epyc Rome atm than we do Navi and Zen 2.  AMD focuses more on the pros and advertising there than Nvidia does.  Nvidia focus more on gamers than they do professionals.  But, Nvidia has a larger budget to focus on both.

Maybe amd is taking advantage of tsmc

Having more open fab time considering nvidia supposedly going with Samsung

Who is really using all that 7nm fab time?

[Rune]

I won't believe its anything more than a 2080 until I see otherwise. Tired of random people online hyping AMD cards.

[DragonTamer1]

 

Currently digging for more salt for this story.

[thorhammerz]

4 hours ago, Bcat00 said:

Why are the members on this forum so in love with exaggerating AMD products?

Such is life when emotions cloud objective reasoning; throw them a piece of red meat and they'll just go at it.

 

 

Spoiler

Build 'dat wall!

...

Make america great again!

...

We have more cores!
...

Our name isn't Nvidia/Intel!

 

[Humbug]

1 hour ago, Rune said:

I won't believe its anything more than a 2080 until I see otherwise. 

 

4 hours ago, CarlBar said:

I didn't say that they couldn't. But better than 2080Ti sounds like a gol rather than something i'd feel confident putting money on. Navi 20 will certainly match the R7 IMO, and maybe beat it a little. But if it'll get upto 2080Ti or above is another matter.

Navi20 high end matching or beating the 2080ti by a little bit will not be a suprise. Keep in mind that this is only due in 2020 so it's a way off.

 

Nvidia will also be launching ampere in that approximate timeframe and that will be the competitor, not the 2080ti.

 

The performance gains on Radeon 7 came just by upping the bandwidth and clockspeeds from shifting to 7nm. Navi high end can take all those benefits plus a new architecture which got much more R&D effort than Vega and was purpose built for 7nm.

 

It may still not be good enough. Because Nvidia's ampere may be faster which puts AMD in the same position as they are now, which is 2nd best in the high end. All i'm saying is that when the time comes matching Nvidia's last gen flagship by using a newer architecture on a superior 7nm node will not be a suprise.

[mr moose]

25 minutes ago, thorhammerz said:

Such is life when emotions cloud objective reasoning; throw them a piece of red meat and they'll just go at it.

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Build 'dat wall!

...

Make america great again!

...

We have more cores!
...

Our name isn't Nvidia/Intel!

 

Sometimes reading these threads is like listening to my kids argue in the backseat about how long it will take to get there.

 

 

 

 

[CarlBar]

21 minutes ago, Humbug said:

 

Navi20 high end matching or beating the 2080ti by a little bit will not be a suprise. Keep in mind that this is only due in 2020 so it's a way off.

 

Nvidia will also be launching ampere in that approximate timeframe and that will be the competitor, not the 2080ti.

 

The performance gains on Radeon 7 came just by upping the bandwidth and clockspeeds from shifting to 7nm. Navi high end can take all those benefits plus a new architecture which got much more R&D effort than Vega and was purpose built for 7nm.

 

It may still not be good enough. Because Nvidia's ampere may be faster which puts AMD in the same position as they are now, which is 2nd best in the high end. All i'm saying is that when the time comes matching Nvidia's last gen flagship by using a newer architecture on a superior 7nm node will not be a suprise.

 

Navi is not an all new architecture. It's basically a reworked Vega with the bottlenecking cut out. That doesn't mean you won't see a performance uptick as it's not clear exactly how they're targeting the bottlenecks. Are they simply removing the excess parts of the pipeline, or adding in new stuff to fill out the area's that are weak, or some mix of both, (my bet is on this for a variety of reasons). And yes Navi will be competing against Ampere. AMD's issue however is that they basically shot themselves in the foot with Vega so they've had an entire generation of GPU's where they've functionally taken 2 steps forward then one step back. Navi is a "cleanup the mistakes we made with Vega" generation more than anything else.

 

Thats not to say they couldn't improve massively on it, but thats asking for a lot of result from the amount of work they're going to have the time and mooney to put in. (Ofc if Navi 20 is on 7nm EUV then the potential gains there may give it the push needed, we don't know). I simply wouldn;t bet on big Navi being anything more than an upper mid range card to the Ampere.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, VegetableStu said:

... i don't get it... ,_,

Neither. Ladder? Step ladder? Stool? Ostrich? Allegedly?

 

Makes no sense on purpose?

[RejZoR]

Would be nice if it does, but it'll again be a bit very late...

[Master Disaster]

I don't believe this, not because I think AMD make bad products but because Navi is AMDs last iteration of GCN entirely.

 

Why would they wait until the last iteration to fix it? That's akin to the guy whose house is sinking paying for remedial work while he waits for the permit to knock it down then once the permit arrives paying to relay the foundations instead. If GCN is really finished I doubt AMD wasted any resources fixing it for its last time to market.

[GoldenLag]

16 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

I don't believe this, not because I think AMD make bad products but because Navi is AMDs last iteration of GCN entirely

I feel like. Lot of people forget this. Its GCN and we know what limits it has, and its not as if those will disappear. 

 

 

Navi could just be Polaris with a node shrink and some ASICs to do raytracing (doubt) and videoencoding. It will have improvements, but in the end its GCN.

 

AMD wont take the high end lead before they move off GCN. They might take other leads, like Mobile etc, but not the high end. 

[ravenshrike]

15 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Why would they wait until the last iteration to fix it?

Because it costs significant amounts of money and staff to fully design model the needed changes and all the money was being sunk into Zen.

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Neither. Ladder? Step ladder? Stool? Ostrich? Allegedly?

 

Makes no sense on purpose?

I was thinking along the lines that maybe it meant you needed a step ladder to reach the conclusion that an emu or ostrich is a bird.

 

Either way, that picture makes more sense than much of the commentary in this thread.

[GoldenLag]

10 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

Because it costs significant amounts of money and staff to fully design model the needed changes and all the money was being sunk into Zen.

You know how old GCN is right?

 

They could have fixed one section at the time. 

 

Old GCN cards are great due to drivers and the architecture holding its own quite well. But these cards are old, and AMD hasnt fixed it. Instead they treated the symptoms with HBM. Which flopped because HBM didnt get produced enough to drop in price

[Master Disaster]

46 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

Because it costs significant amounts of money and staff to fully design model the needed changes and all the money was being sunk into Zen.

And now those same resources are being sunk into GCNs replacement rather than fixing the architecture that's been around since 2011 and will be replaced by 2020 (rumoured).

[ravenshrike]

13 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

And now those same resources are being sunk into GCNs replacement rather than fixing the architecture that's been around since 2011 and will be replaced by 2020 (rumoured).

Nah, they probably sunk enough resources in to fix the major issue because they finally had some money freed up with the success of Zen which lets them use it for the PS5 as well as have a competing product up to mid-stack gaming and full on compute for Zen 2's release.

[GoldenLag]

12 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

Nah, they probably sunk enough resources in to fix the major issue because they finally had some money freed up with the success of Zen which lets them use it for the PS5 as well as have a competing product up to mid-stack gaming and full on compute for Zen 2's release.

Um.... Last time i checked Sony was involved with helping with Navi. 

 

And its been quite a lot of years of relativly ok funding. 

 

They havent fixed GCN, because it has inherent issues. They are probably circumventing the issues or treating them, but they are still there. 

 

Note how its not big Navi untill at least next year. We are getting a polaris succesor, and those arent very big chips.