Last month, AMD unveiled the Radeon RX 7000 family of graphics cards, built on the brand-new RDNA 3 micro-architecture. Team Red provided more information on the anticipated performance, despite the company’s relative silence regarding the performance of its new 7900 series GPUs that day. However, no comparisons with Nvidia’s RTX 4090 or the older 3000 series were made.
We calculated the anticipated performance of the flagship $999 RX 7900 XTX and the $899 RX 7900 XT using AMD’s estimates. The predicted performance is somewhat in line with what one may have expected based on comparing it to the previous generation, i.e., the rasterization throughput is superior to the RTX 4080 but it cannot compete in terms of ray tracing. However, the $1,599 RTX 4090 is unaffected, as neither the 7900 XT nor the 7900 XTX come close.
In addition to these two, AMD is rumoured to introduce the RX 7800 series in 2019. The RX 7800 series, a tier-below product, is anticipated to be based on the Navi 32 whereas the 7900 series is based on Navi 31. We now know that the Navi 32 has 30 Work Group Processors (WGPs), or 60 Compute Units, as early sources had stated. This is due to recent information revealed in AMD’s ROCmWMMA GitHub source, which validates the CU counts of the Navi 3x hardware.
RX 7800 or RX 7800 XT, 60 CU?
Although we now know the general Navi 3x characteristics, it is currently difficult to predict what the RX 7800 series’ precise specifications will be. However, if AMD does really price the RX 7800 XT as a 60CU SKU, it may be viewed as a failure as the 6800 XT featured 12 more compute units at 72. This indicates that the performance uplift for the 7800 XT from generation to generation will be incredibly bad, if not nonexistent.
Another possibility is that the RX 7800 non-XT will really be made from the whole Navi 32 60 CU die. In comparison to the RX 6800, this will make a lot more sense to upgrade to. If the latter is the case, AMD will further reduce the Navi 31’s 84 CUs from what it has on the 7900 XT.
Early speculations, however, do not point to the existence of such a processor, suggesting AMD may not even be working on the RX 7800 XT. Users of the 6800 XT will therefore need to upgrade to the RX 7900 series, which is priced far higher than the 6800 XT or even the 6900 XT are currently being sold for.
