Graphics Cards

[colesdav]

RDNA2, RDNA Refresh, and "Big Navi" Launch and Reviews.

It looks like it will not be long before real information will start to get released about RDNA2 and "Big Navi". 

I am opening this thread to capture information about RDNA2, RDNA Refresh, and Big Navi Launch and Reviews.

I will only include information such as:

Benchmarks or Reviews of XBOX Series X and PS5 which include "RDNA2" GPU.

Information released by AMD on RDNA2 and Big Navi.

Information about any "RDNA Refresh" of the RX5000 series GPUs.

Benchmark data from AMD and YouTube Benchmarks and Reviews.

I will be watching out for the information and reading reviews anyhow so I will post data here if I see it.

If anyone has useful data such as described above then can you please add information here?

Please avoid wild speculations from "Tech YouTubers" who seem to make outrageous performance improvement claims based on "rumours" from "reliable leakers".

They often seem to yoyo their conclusions on a weekly basis just to get better viewing numbers or deny their predictions were complete rubbish when they get it wrong, and huff about it.

[ajlueke]

Another thing that isn't mentioned as much, is that the RTX 3080 and 3090 founders editions have a truly small PCB.  If you are planning on liquid cooling, you can potentially do some really powerful small form factor builds.

[ajlueke]

"I look forward to see RX6900XT performance, and hope they will be available from AIB partners in 2 slot AIO Liquid Cooler version."

If not, you can always do it yourself.

https://www.ekwb.com/shop/ek-quantum-reaction-aio-rx-6800-6900-d-rgb-p240-amd-radeon-edition

Then it really will cost as much as a RTX 3090.

[pokester]

---

@ajlueke wrote:

"I look forward to see RX6900XT performance, and hope they will be available from AIB partners in 2 slot AIO Liquid Cooler version."

If not, you can always do it yourself.

https://www.ekwb.com/shop/ek-quantum-reaction-aio-rx-6800-6900-d-rgb-p240-amd-radeon-edition

Then it really will cost as much as a RTX 3090.

---

I saw that power cooler already has a liquid cooler 6800 version listed on their page. You might see if it would meet your needs when a 6900 variant becomes available. I would bet they will have one. 

I am also wondering if Saphire might do a waster cooled Toxic version as well. 

[rainingtacco]

I think RT will truly shine with next nvidia generation. Right now it's good, but only for strongest gpus and low resolution to maintain true native resolution, RT and acceptable[60fps] framerates. When we will get 1440p 60 fps RT GPUs for 400-500 usd i will finally accept the tech. 

[pokester]

I can tell you that I played Control with RTX and DLSS on at 1440p on my 4k TV which also upsamples signals to 4K. From 10 feet away the picture quality to me was no different than 4K native. Playing that game made me a believer in the tech. Plus the graphics in that game really were such a huge part of making you want to keep playing. Wow that game looks just fantastic. 

[rainingtacco]

Im going to wait this generation, my 5700 XT still suffice in normal rasterization on 1080p, all i need is 80 fps if not 60 fps is good too. The next generation of RT should be mature enough i hope. Wonder if AMD will do a big leap in RT performance, the 6800XT perf/w is surely impressive -slightly higher wattage than 5700XT for 90% more performance. If they can do such magic with RT RDNA3 might give nvidia run for its money. 

[pokester]

I would imagine their next gen will be better. The key to success honestly though is to have super sampling tech to make it possible. Without a DLSS alternative RT just can't reach it's potential. 

Unlike Steve Burke at Gamers Nexus and Linus from LTT. Most reviewers realize that the Nvidia performance is yes better. Steve and Linus though point out that that all ray tracing games are not just shadows or reflections and that productivity apps really favor team green. Most the games right now with exception to a few only use one or maybe two ray tracing features. The few games that use all rat tracing features suddenly make AMD look crippled compared to Nvidia at the moment. Full path traced games just bring RDNA2 to its knees and DLSS added in just adds insult to injury making team green as much as 300 percent ahead when the red team in just rasterization performance was in the lead in many case. Reality is though that we are assuredly at the dawn of rasterization being what matters not being the dominant argument anymore.

So if you don't mind forgoing ray tracing for another generation, and skipping a much better companion set of software and honestly better proven drivers for the past couple years I do think the AMD cards are really awesome at rasterization performance. Likely it will hold them over pretty nice till next gen and hopefully they can finally pull off true feature parity on all fronts. 

The question is though for most people which camps card will last 5 years. AMD may be left in the dust by weaker Ray Tracing and if they can come out with comparable DLSS tech. Nvidia however in their continued stingy ways continues to IMHO cripple their cards with less memory, making it very likely that card is going to last 5 years either without being replaced. Both camps have their caveats. 

If you already have a decent last gen card that is working out for you then most likely the smart thing to do, is wait a year for either better refresh of this gen  or next gen stuff. I have a good feeling that the competition over this next year is going to make what is available to consumers much more worth the money with what comes next over this gen. 

[rainingtacco]

Truth be told i don't like the fact that AMD performance in graphic design programs is either locked to opencl or very bad. I don't use these programs oftently, but sometimes i do[3d printing, some photoshop, handbrake for video encoding] and amd is quite poor at that. I didn't really know that before buying xD Good that my livelihood is not dependent on that. 

And RT without DLSS will become thing in future, right now we have to use that upscalling which doesn't look as good as native. We can say its as good, but on some fine details it shows ugglines. 

[pokester]

Actually DLSS tech isn't going away and if you have seen DLSS 2, I can't imagine how you can say it looks bad. Control looks fantastic and I have not seen a review of that game yet that doesn't agree. Battlefield V when RTX and DLss first came out looked pretty bad. However a year later and it looks fantastic. Minecraft looks fantastic. I can't name a single game that uses DLSS at this point that suffers from its use. I can tell you this. Sure if zoomed in and looking at a still picture of a scene you can spot the difference. However I can tell you that the having to turn the resolution down to make resolution  playable without it looks far far worse. 

The truth is that DLSS is the future it isn't going away we are at a point that rasterization performance is already pushing the bounds of cpu capablilty. We have new GPU right now that bottleneck the brand new top cpu architecture.  It is all the other tech that is going to push things forward to high refresh 4k to 8k and beyond. The brute force method at least in the near future  of the next 5 to 10 years is quickly becoming unsustainable. This is why AMD is developing their own Super Sampling tech that hopefully will become a open standard as they are great by comparison to Nviidia in that regard. They don't hold the world hostage with proprietary features. If AMD didn't think it was the future too they would not be developing it. And I promise you they will be looking to greatly improve RT performance as well but RT and Super Sampling tech go hand and hand for the near future in making moving forward a possibility. 

When it comes to productivity Nvidia has just got the market. Unfortunately open cl  could have caught on and could still in the future. I sure wish the open standard had dominance. However AMD's inability to compete for many years now left them with such little market share that they basically gave away the store. They have to win that back to gain the relevance  again to get the developer back on board to optimize to the api they use. 

[ajlueke]

"ctually DLSS tech isn't going away and if you have seen DLSS 2, I can't imagine how you can say it looks bad. "

Well, he didn't say it looks bad, just that it doesn't look as good as native, which it doesn't.

"The truth is that DLSS is the future it isn't going away"  It really isn't the future, there is just way to much overhead in building those libraries to get it to work well.  So it is only worth doing in some AAA games and big releases to help push video cards but it will never be a highly supported feature, it's just too much work.  

"This is why AMD is developing their own Super Sampling tech"

To be clear, DLSS isn't supersampling, it's upscaling.  Supersampling is rendering at a higher resolution and scaling down to the the display.  That will always look better than DLSS or native, but has huge performance costs as your hardware actually renders above your native resolution.  I think once GPU hardware can supersample at 4K at 60fps there will likely be little need to spend the time building a DLSS library.

[pokester]

Well that's semantics it's two different ways of saying it doesn't look good, to me. So my apologies if I didn't quote the exact same words. Anyway I wasn't saying what I said to bash what the poster said anyway just to clarify what the reality of the experience likely may be for many other users.

I guess the best way to say it, is if I were buying I would suggest looking for yourself and deciding for yourself if you think you mind the very very minor deficit to the visual fidelity at this point. 

People are still reading the early reviews on DLSS and think it is bad. It is the bad thing about reviews they very rarely ever get re-made or updated when things improve. The negatives stick for years. 

Same as the OP's post one persons opinion especially coupled with some old data on the net at this point would make many thing the tech is not sufficient. Most of the reviews of the 6800 series this time around when comparing it to team green even point out how good DLSS is now and that AMD has yet to bring something to market to compare. 

I can tell you this too. If that little bit of a change in fidelity would keep you from using a tech. Then you may want to avoid ray tracing on the new AMD cards as well. Many of the reviewers show that that AMDs implementation yes added ray traced shadows or reflections but also overall degraded the look, kinda defeating the purpose of ray tracing. 

To me that was really bad from the few examples Steve showed. On the other hand I can't see the difference at 4k on my tv from 8 ft away with DLSS. 

At the end of the day everyone has to decide what they like for themself. And whatever that is a valid choice as it at that point is YOUR card and YOUR experience. 

I just want to warn against letting someone else decide what is acceptable to YOU for YOU. 

[pokester]

Honestly you are correct, yes upscaling is the better term. It was very late when I posted that. However I have heard tech sites use the lingo fairly interchangeably too. 

In reality DLSS isn't solidly just upscaling either. At least no more so than in what upscaling meant before it was coupled with AI, sharpening, etc.  It is more of a meld of components from both methods combined with new AI technology. Regardless still semantics. As it really doesn't matter as the end result is radically different and better than what either of those did alone. 

When whatever DLSS becomes when a final Open Standard evolves it will likely be its own definition and not either of those others. 

[ajlueke]

Something they potentially could do, is create a crowd sourced version of this.  You can collect gaming frames from real users who play a title at 4K on an RTX 3090 lets say.  And then use that library for DLSS for RTX 3070 users who have a 4K monitor.  That would make it a lot easier to have libraries of images for a wider variety of title.

[colesdav]

New AIB RX6800XT  GPU from XFX:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibSzzVtKzJo

[pokester]

---

@colesdav wrote:

New AIB RX6800XT  GPU from XFX:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibSzzVtKzJo

---

Sorry this reviewers lost me when he told us how many Cuda cores this AMD card has. LOL

[colesdav]

Sure, I posted it just so people can actually take a look at the GPU.

I think you will find that many reviewers make "slips of the tongue" or downright mistakes in their reviews.

If you know anything about him, this reviewer suffers from severe health problems and has been struggling to keep his channel going.

Here is his web page: https://techoftomorrow.com/

He did excellent review of the Sapphire HD7970 OC 6GB GHz editions years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpffVqgJH8U

[colesdav]

Gamers Nexus are currently running a Twitter Poll.

After reviews, which GPU would you purchase?

RTX 3080   = 50.9%
RX6800XT  = 23.7%
RTX3070    = 18.8%
RX6800      = 6.6%

The poll is still open so you can vote.

"https://twitter.com/GamersNexus/status/1330377328254480390?s=20"

[pokester]

---

@colesdav wrote:

Sure, I posted it just so people can actually take a look at the GPU.

I think you will find that many reviewers make "slips of the tongue" or downright mistakes in their reviews.

If you know anything about him, this reviewer suffers from severe health problems and has been struggling to keep his channel going.

Here is his web page: https://techoftomorrow.com/

He did excellent review of the Sapphire HD7970 OC 6GB GHz editions years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpffVqgJH8U

I enjoyed his video, I was joking  hence the LOL on the end. 

Thanks I have looked at all the links you gave and appreciate the effort as usual.....

---

[colesdav]

PowerColor Red Devil Information on PowerColor Website:
https://www.powercolor.com/new?id=1605680077

No specifications at time of posting.
They should turn up soon.

I think it looks ugly and it is not for me, prefer the Sapphire Nitro series.
But each to their own.

[colesdav]

PowerColor Red Devil Reviews: 

https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/147022-powercolor-radeon-rx-6800-xt-red-devil-limited-editio...

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/powercolor-radeon-rx-6800-xt-red-devil/

[colesdav]

PowerColor Red Dragon RX6800XT GPUs on the way: 

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/powercolor-red-dragon-radeon-rx-6800-xt-gpus

[pokester]

---

@colesdav wrote:

PowerColor Red Dragon RX6800XT GPUs on the way: 

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/powercolor-red-dragon-radeon-rx-6800-xt-gpus

---

Bitwit has a video up on this card too...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awy2o9iDc_w

[colesdav]

Thanks for posting that one. 

[pokester]

Hardware Unboxed has their review up this morning on the Red Devil 6800 XT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk20IzZN-xk

So pay attention where he talks about the pricing. This card is 800 dollars MSRP. Which is insane. And all the people saying it isn't AMD. He says and to me explains to the point of proof, it is AMD screwing both AIB partners and end users on this AIB  rape on price. 

Yes Nvidia was charging 50 to 70 bucks higher to aib partners than they were selling for and that is bad.

AMD is apparently charging about 150 over. Power Color actually said their margins have never been smaller, outing AMD as the reason the pricing is so inflated. Wow with this gen Ryzen increase and now the new GPU, AMD is delusional. This is some serious gouging. This should not be supported by buyers. The sad thing is end users will buy at these prices as long as they are in limited supply. Such a sad time for gamers, especially heading into the holidays. How supper disappointing. 

[colesdav]

Sapphire Nitro+ RX6800XT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzjRPbSIW4I

[colesdav]

Some more RX6800XT Reviews:

XFX RX 6800 XT Merc Review:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWayf21EwL0

[colesdav]

PowerColor Red Dragon 6800 video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwFuK5cEb6w

Hopefully Gamer's Nexus will review the Red Dragon GPUs.
But this is all I have seen for now.

[colesdav]

Good Old Gamer discusses RX6000 series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2Zn-rCditU

[colesdav]

Graphically Challenged:

RX6000 series launch a disaster...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyft_4OZ5vU

[colesdav]

Digital Foundry RX6800/XT or Nvidia RTX3080/3090?

https://youtu.be/7QR9bj951UM?t=1518

[colesdav]

Buildzoid review of the PowerColor Red Devil RX6800XT PCB. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atb7jEaZ5LQ

[colesdav]

Buildzoid took the pictures for the PowerColor Red Devil PCB from the the following Techpowerup review: 
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/powercolor-radeon-rx-6800-xt-red-devil/
I repeat the link to the review for convenience.

[colesdav]

Some interesting and potentially good news for the PowerColor Red Devil RX6800XT. 
It is using TDA21472 smart power stages which incorporate accurate current monitoring. 

https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/power/dc-dc-converters/integrated-power-stages/tda21472/ 

[colesdav]

If AMD have fitted those smart power stages and they are used in closed loop control and accessible to Radeon Adrenalin 2020 Software then this could explain part of the reason why the AMD power numbers are good this time around versus Nvidia RTX3080. 

The main reason is AMD are using advanced TSMC 7nm process versus Nvidia using more power hungry Samsung 8nm. 

[colesdav]

I have a contact who has managed to get hold of an RX6800XT reference GPU.
They intend to fit a waterblock to the GPU. 

They agreed to check the board and find out what smart power stages are used on the RX6800XT Reference PCB. 
I have been trying everywhere to get hold of a RX6800XT GPU and they are simply not avalable anywhere I tried.
   

[colesdav]

Here is an update regrding the Smart Power Stages on the RX6800/XT reference boards. 
Made By AMD (MBA). 

The MBA boards do use IR TDA21472 ICs which allow current monitoring, 
 
ASUS is also using the same IR 35217 as a PWM controller, Infineon XDPE132G5D as a VRM controller and IR TDA21472 as power stages for the TUF and ROG models.

Still need confirmation that they are actually being used in closed loop hardware and/or software control to limit total board input power.  

Also need to find out if the Radeon Performance Overlay on the RX6800/XT reports GPU power or if it now (or also) reports Total Board Input Power.

[colesdav]

Gamers Nexus Overclocking of RX6800XT cards. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B42trkvUz4s

[colesdav]

The Asus RX6800XT AIO Liquid Cooled hybrid (it has a VRAM fan as well) card was only 1.25% faster than the air cooled cards. 
Although it is 2 slot, there is lots of wiring on the rubber hosing to the dual fan cooler looks a mess.

There is another video about the Asus Hybrid LC GPU here: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VFgPWF-Btk

 

[colesdav]

Resizeable BAR (aka RX6800/XT, 6900XT SAM) tested on Intel Z490 motherboards.

Article here: 

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/resizable-bar-intel-z490-motherboard-benchmarks

[colesdav]

Article here: 

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/resizable-bar-intel-z490-motherboard-benchmarks

[colesdav]

ASUS Strix OC LC 6800XT: 

4% faster than reference 6800XT GPU and ~ 8% faster when overclocked at 2K Ultra on Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
6% faster than reference 6800XT GPU and ~ 19% faster when overclocked at 4K Ultra on Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
Runs cool and quiet. 
Messy wiring with the fans. Very impressive overall. 
Almost as fast as an RTX3090. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DIJvNxCDec&feature=emb_logo

A 6900XT version should be interesting.