4:00 i guess the transistor count on ga102 is wrong here

Do not forget, Nvidia actually jumped 2 nodes. Ampere was on Samsung's 8nm, which is just a refined 10nm. They now skipped 7nm and went straight to 4N, which is a refined 5nm. Previously with RDNA2 AMD had about 1 node advantage. Now they are ~half a node behind.

This is so frustrating. All of GCN had power draw issues. Those finally seemed fixed with RDNA1 and 2. Now we're back to square one. IMO AMD should have waited with the release until they fixed whatever is wrong here. Also, their driver team needs more people! Drivers being rough around the edges at every launch doesn't need to happen anymore with the profit AMD has been making during the last few years. This would also allow them to start thoroughly testing the HW way earlier, potentially allowing them to resolve issues before they ever become public.

I knew there was a problem when they gave their launch presentation. ALL of the presenters, including Lisa Su looked horribly uncomfortable. They knew there were problems and that they weren’t ready to release the hardware, but really had no choice but to launch during the holiday season. I’m hoping, for their sake, that they can make serious improvements through drivers.

As always with significant arch change, I'll wait for the 2nd version or at least a refresh.

My view on this, the 7900 series being the 1st chiplet based GPU is a HUGE beta test, kind of like Zen 1 was. As people use these new GPUs and AMD gets feedback, they will change things and fix things as they redesign the chiplets for RDNA4, now, with this in mind, if AMD goes the way I think they are heading, next gen could be VERY interesting, multiple chiplet based GPU (just like how Zen evolved), this is when AMD might have a wild performance swing on the positive side. But until then, I agree, the 7900xtx is not meeting my expectations so I'll just hang on to my 6900xt and 3080ti until next gen. On the nVidia side, agreed, the 4080 is way overpriced and so is the 4090, but the 4090 is the fastest GPU at this time but commands a ridiculous price. nVidia has gone full circle, the 3000 series were power pigs (I know my FTW3 3080ti is) and now they are much better, where as the AMD 6000 series was power efficient, now they are the power pigs.

It wouldn't surprise me if there multiple small issues/bugs in the chip/driver. I work in software, and often there the QA folks test A, and they test B and they test C, and all three might pass, but when they combine A+B+C it doesn't go so well. Often too, there is a push from the top to meet the "date". Everyone knows its an artificial date, and does it really matter a whole lot if its released on Monday or Friday? Most cases its doesn't matter, but from the wallstreet side it does seem to matter, and they really want to make that date. The TSMC capacity is an interesting point, if I was paying for that capacity, and had a choice of getting nothing for my money or something sub-optimal, I think I would take the sub-optimal instead of nothing myself. Ill bet they were hoping/praying that they would solve the issues between the announcement date and launch date, ive seen behaviors similar to that in my career. If there are issues, I hope AMD can identify and correct the issues quickly.

If Radeon hadn't lied about performance in their reveal the reviews would be much more in Radeon's favor and there would be much less hate from the community.

The 1st CPU chiplet Zen 1 had plenty of weird performance dips if you weren't doing all core workloads and there is probably something in RDNA3 currently that just isn't tuned properly. AMD probably had to shove this out the door now to please shareholders and customers who buy now are going to be have a sub-optimal version of RDNA3. Maybe we see a proper respin next year? But always hoping that ATI/AMD will get better next generation versus the competition is getting tiring now. Lastly, this really felt to me that AMD should not have priced it as the 79xx the top tier labeling and price and should have done what they did with the 5700XT generation and label them one price tier below for what they are.

I can actually confirm all of this. I’ve been on RDNA3 testing for fun and found RDNA2 more stable and was left scratching my head.

Nvidia conceded a penalty kick and AMD sent it to the stands... didn't even hit the post

Power management having issues is something AMD's GPU division is no stranger to. Maybe some fundamental mechanism of that (i.e. clock gating) is broken, so that unutilized parts of the GPU can't be shutdown in some cases. As for the interconnect between the GCD and MCDs, this is said to comsume around 20-30W.

Very surprised how few subscribers you have based on the quality of your videos. Objective vs subjective reviews are always much better in my opinion. Please keep making content like this, as it's only a matter of time before you gain the audience you deserve.

35% more PERFORMANCE than the previous generation for the SAME PRICE, is good generational improve if you ask me.

AMD confirmed that the silicon is fine re: shader prefetch. The fact that they nailed it on the first (A0) taping is a testament to the skills of their hardware engineers. The issues lie with their drivers.

Thanks for making this video! It's really refreshing to have this kind of talk instead of fully dissing a product like the other youtubers out there!

The 790xtx isn't bad, but the price of everything isn't great. All of the currently released 'next-gen' cards are missing dollar/frame gains. Nothing is actually performing better per dollar. The industry has stagnated. Until they drop prices to normal the industry is stalled. These new cards should be $200 less than they are, or more in the case of the 4090.

Your opinion seems the most balanced on the subject, from my point of view (I've watched other youtubers also) New technology (chiplets) will always have issues at first, it's normal, but, what's not normal is to waste so much reputation and trust gained in many years, just to cover the mistakes. As a solution, I don't know the best route, but, if I were AMD, I would compensate somehow the buyers on RDNA3.

AMD made a card much faster than the 3090ti for $899/999. Even at todays prices, that seem reasonable but it did not live up to the huge hype.

I believe the clock speed/power issue can be fixed with firmware/drivers, but AMD has a piss poor history of quick and proper fixes. The performance deficit however is permanent, unless we're talking about boosting power consumption to 4090 levels. But even then, a 4090 with its power limited to 355W is already outperforming the 7900XTX at that wattage. AMD is basically second tier this generation. And then they keep using that adage: "Age like fine wine", which to me implies they launch a subpar product and have to fix it over its 2 year life cycle, before the next gen launches. That's a cop out to me. It should fly, right out of the gate, and not take part or its entire lifecycle to reach its potential. I'm not sure how some people can even defend that notion. They should have launched this card as a 7800XTX and priced it as such. As it stands, they are as bad as nVidia in misrepresenting this card as a top tier performer. And it definitely is priced the same as the overpriced 4080.

Just stumbled upon your channel and I love it so much, thank you for making these informative videos!

The prices are actually just as frustrating as the lower than expected performance improvement. I Just feel like the cards are 200 dollars above what they should be. Nvidia did even worse regarding that. Guess i'll stick to my 6700xt for a couple of years and skip this generation.

The comparison in purely transistor count is not very fair. A significant portion of the die is dedicated to cache, which doesn't scale much in density from 7nm to 5nm, and 7900XTX has the same total die size while needing to dedicate a large portion to cache. Looking at the GCD, 6950xt has 80 compute units or 5120 shader units, while 7900xtx has 96 compute units or 6144 shader units. That's a 20% increase in CU count for >30% increase in performance.

good video dude. I too think that navi 31 is likely broken, but i think the largest miss is not performance but efficiency. I like my cards and cpu low power and efficient and the clearest sign of this die being unfinished or broken is the messed up high power use when more then 1 monitor is used. something is up here but performance, to me, is actually fine. It beats the 4080 and costs less, if there are driver updates that increase perf its just a bonus to me but efficiency should be the focus

it feels like even though they dont meet their promises the cards still perform well especially compared to the other options out there at the moment

I hope nvidia drops the price of the 4080 just to put heat on the 7900xtx. Even a drop to $1,100 makes it worth it against the 7900xtx

Imo most of the problems can be derived back to the MBA (made by AMD) card being not well put together. 1. the factory default voltage it too high on these cards, with undervolting the cards can reach 2.9+ GHz clockspeed even on the MBA card 2. the factory default power limit is limiting these cards 3. 2x8 pin connector is not enough for the card to stretch it's legs, on 3x8 pin AIB cards it boosts to much higher clockspeeds 4. the cooler on the MBA card is not sufficient when it boosts at default voltage TPU showed that the AIB cards with huge coolers, 3x8 pin power connectors, undervolting and higher power limit these cards are beasts. AMD should've shipped the MBA card with lower default voltage, it would've reach 2.8-2.9 GHz without high temperature and without throttling (the reason why the fps results are all over the place) and everyone would be much happier so to speak.

You invite discussion - that's wonderful and appreciated! Your analysis is great. You lean into the specific statements made, don't engage in baseless speculation and offer supporting evidence for all of your assertions. The "I look forward to knowing whether I'm right or wrong" statement is all too rare and wonderful. Love the fact that you called out the power impact of going to an MCM architecture - most reviewers didn't touch on this at all when comparing the 7900 series to Ada. My opinion is that, as was the case with Zen and Zen+, AMD opted to launch RDNA3 as-is and defer some features and architectural uplift to RDNA4. AMD have a history of doing this, as TSVs were in place on Zen 2 but not leveraged until Zen 3 for stacked cache dies. Once again, please keep going!

Very informative and entertaining video! The purpose was to provide a plausible set of events that fit the facts and rumors at the time and you succeeded. With that being said, how does your story change now that AMD claims the prefetcher is fine?

That's all great of course. But what about all the folks who already bought 7900 XTX? RMA and wait until summer?

People are putting way too much thought into this. My 2 cents. Release graphs were accurate provided inhouse testing, review drivers and first release have problems. We are talking about a tech company with loads of middle management, and dozens of sub teams within sub teams. Even Linus said they were incredibly late to release the review drivers, so your analysis that a bug was discovered last second and they had to crunch to get something out is most likely the case... The architecture turn is the other side of the equation, lots of new means more unknowns... "But Nvidias is better"... Nvidia took everything they already had and just cranked it up to 11, throw a ridiculously oversized cooler on it and call it a day. Then scream that Moore's law is dead and charge crazy prices. AMD has the challenge of competing with that on a radically new architecture... I bet by February we will see AMD get much closer to that 50% improvement per generation. Next generation may even be more interesting if AMD perfects this architecture since Nvidia can't rely on their coolers getting any bigger.

8 months later and all RDNA3 GPU's are out now - same lack of performance and efficiency for all of them. I'm thinking there is some fundamental design problem with RDNA3 at this point.

The problem is their slides say they tested it against the 6900xt while the guys on stage said 6950xt when you look at the test systems they used. They weren't even on the same page within the company 🤦🏽‍♂️

I think it was pretty good timing how the consoles landed on getting RDNA 2, it was a well executed generation. Zen 3 would’ve been a plus too but oh well

Super informative! Thank you 👍

So is the 7900xtx a gpu with hyberthreading enabled?

This was a great video. Thanks for sharing!

Simplistic i know ( but I like simple ) If you class the gpu structure as a mechanism. Amd have suddenly gone from 1 moving part in N 21 to 7 for N31. Thus my take on it would be the problems they are facing is the silicon equivalent of a mechanical tolerance stack. Where instead of dimensional tolerances the stack could be more along the lines of binning tolerances. Leading to the discrepancies of performance between each component. even though on paper each part fits perfectly. Of course getting drivers to accomodate this silicon stack variance would be difficult as pin pointing the errorrs and combinations would be an up hill struggle.

6950xt isnt flagship. It came out a while after the 6900xt. Good information though, thank you for this.

Loved the video, RX 7X50 sounds more closer now. Thanks.

An interesting insight and conversation about the new card and for the usage I have I am looking at getting the older 6750XT as it meets and actually exceeds my requirements

My guess is they determined that RDNA3 was good enough and their flaws in RT and AI makes then as competitive as they were going to be without requiring more R&D money. If RDNA4 info ever comes out, I hope it's more competitive architecturally.

Greed is the straight answer as to what led AMD to this mess and why they sacrificed consumers trust. As you, I had high hopes for the new architecture, irrespective of performance comparisons, specially to Nvidia. Im very thankful to the independent reviewers that called out the huge discrepancies and far from looking at that as a hate bandwagon I see it as appropriate accountability. What really gets to me is AMDs vanity. They are in such a weak position now, regarding to market share and public perception. I sincerely hope AMD can do something to fix and improve performance for those 1k+ parts and advance innovation with the chiplet design. I also wish they would price their products accordingly, but we can see that's a very tall order for Lisa's minions =)

from what I gather the perf uplift seems to come from the wider memory bus, the additional compute perf is not really in effect like it was on ampere/ada. We dont see the perf uplift like we saw with ampere with its int/fp alu units.

Have all these flaws or issues more or less been corrected in the upcoming Navi 32 (RX 7800 xt) release?

There is a problem if you overclock the GPU that the performance go down. Some KZfaq camels have reported about that. There is one thing that catch me about that. The clock speed goes up and the memory down. I think the memory controller doesn’t get called for data from the gpu and lowers the clock. Maybe I’m totally wrong, but could it be that there is a error correction inside the GPU. If the clock goes up more and more errors happen, and the data must be calculated again and again. If it is like that, that is why there is low activity to the RAM. This happened all intern inside the gpu and the cache What are you thinking ?

I have a Sapphire 7900 XTX reference card and its been interesting. At stock the junction temps hit 110c in most games after 5-10 minutes, however by capping the GPU clock to 2500Mhz and reducing voltage to 1100mV from 1150 only RT games push the junction temp beyond 75c. What is really odd about this is in Horizon Zero Dawn I do lose 2fps when capped (4K, Ultimate quality) but at stock the clocks where only 2650Mhz anyway, when capped it averages 2520Mhz. The cap also reduces board power from a peak of 346w (which it hit often) to 303w which is only hit occasionally during the benchmark run. In Heaven benchmark at stock it takes less than 4 minutes for the junction temp to hit 90c, while capped it sits at 73c without issue after 15 minutes. The only game I can't fix yet is Metro Exodus EE (4K, Ultra RT, 2x VRS), as the clocks don't go above 2500Mhz at stock never mind capped, the card still hits 346w board power and the junction temps do hit 90c pretty quickly, however, they don't ramp beyond 100c like they do at stock. PS this is NOT an air flow issue, when the junction temps hit 110c the core temps DROP as the fans hit 100% (and my PC sounds like its about to take off 🤣)

Are we comparing flagships though? Is there not going to be a 7950 introduced at some point?

i actually think the specifications cant be directly compared. i think the 6144 shader count makes much more sense and if you calculate tflops with this number in mind the numbers really do all add up. that 61.4 tflops assumes that the gpu can run dual issue fp32 which obviously most games cannot. this is why some games the 7900xtx is faster than a 4090 then others it barely matches a 4080 this is likely expected performance. this also makes sense why nvidia with the 30 series didnt hesitate to list the dual fp32 shaders as normal shaders where as amd is choosing to say 6144 not 12288. likely something in the design requires specific things to take place to utilize the rdna 3 design fully. i dont this drivers will fix this and i think people should just accept this is what we got. they arent bad gpu's by any means quite the opposite and i am sure with time stability and some performance will increase. i just wouldnt sit here waiting for some massive turn around because its never gonna happen. id gladly take an aib 7900xtx and run it at 3 ghz and id be more than happy with that level of performance. who knows maybe this time we will actually get a rdna 3+ next year with tweaks to better utilize the shaders. but honestly i think the gpu is running at the perf you should expect out of 6144 shaders and 31 tflops

i love these styles of videos, they are very informative and i love hearing about the underlying archatecture of these things.

There is nothing wrong with this card other than the price. Its a $699 card and I hope we see that price by the fall of next year. Like every amd release, ignore the reference models. As for performance, drivers will squeeze out another 15% in the near term. Hardcore enthusiast(water) will have a field day with >3100mhz clocks, 2800mhz vram and

Lisa Su needs to focus on their Radeon department.

35% is around the average for a generational leap. With the radical design change with chiplets it is actually impressive they did this. Yes they should have been more honest with performance expectations. Losing goodwill and trust is not good.

I'm commenting for the algorithm. You deserve far more subscribers.

In november of 2023, my 7900 XT is awesome. No issues, and a seemless switch from Nvidia with a DDU wipe. Very happy with my team change. Lol especially for how much of a beast i got for the money.

I expect a little better increase in performance with drivers than the 6900XT and 6950XT, Maybe 10-15% or so. Hope that I'm wrong and AMD can squeeze more performance out of that GPUs

Thank you for the video

Good Input! Like it! I got myself a 4080, wanted a xtx on 13th dezember, but then things Turned around and I got myself a new GPU, and I think just for myself I made the right decision, but I still think both Nvidia and AMD make good GPUs!

I like the uplift of the 6600 vs 7600. FP32 8.9 Tflops vs 21.75 Tflops for 123 vs 146 Watts with some 20ms spikes at 249 vs 186 watts power consumption. Taken from techpowerup. Looks like there is ~30% more cu in 7600 along with the RDNA3 generation update

such great information. i wonder that the more popular hardware channels are hardly covering that. They are to busy with products being thrown at them.

Not having watched the video yet my reasoning is below. RDNA3 performance is less than expected, but its worth keeping in mind 30-40% improvement generation over generation is typically what we see with new generations. Personally I think we will see AMD make up the performance in a revision, but I think we will need to wait for that to manifest in a 7950XT and XTX. Just like how it wasn't Xen 1 but Xen 2 that refined and improved the new design. That said I imagine the below reasons to be why performance isn't where most expects, they are in order of what I consider impactful but its a combination of all these things that delivered the results we've seen. 1. Cache Size & Speed - RDNA3 only has about 6MB of total L2 cache (vs 98MB of AD102) AMD then needs to go off chip in order to access its larger L3 memory cache (Infinity Cache) which while a good size but it's going to be much slower when compared to L2 and likely won't be able to transfer data between the GCD to the Infinity Cache without crippling performance. I suspect this is why AMD heavily improved the transfer rates between its various levels of cache in order to remove as much bottle necking as possible. 2. Driver Optimization - The new RDNA3 architecture is an entirely new design and is likely leaving a fair bit of performance on the table due to early driver support, I suspect we could see up to a 10% uplift over the next couple of months and likely a few extra percentage beyond that as it ages. 3. Power Targets - At only 100-200Mhz higher clock speeds and nearly identical identical power draw and board power AMD is clearly not getting the most out of their node shrink, we've also seen Videos from places like Jayz2Cents that see very little gains from GPU overclocking when pushed heavily the cards appears to be reducing Shader performance to maintain stability. Although this could simply be a software bug on the GPU or tuning software. 4. Time - AMD didn't launch with the unveiling of the 7900XT and XTX in November as one expected but instead waited until early December, likely to have a new product on sale for Q4 earnings reports and holiday season. This lends some credence to the rumor that RDA3 may be an early version of Silicon (Probably A0), which isn't technically a bad thing it means the first batch of chips were hitting the majority of their targets and is totally workable, but it may also signify they may not have had time to tweak or optimize as much as they'd like to meet that Q4 deadline where they needed to ramp production with what they could manufacturer immediately. This could help explain the many rumors of how amazing RNDA 3 was performing in recent lab leaks and even AMD's own slides.

I am more than happy with the uplift over my 6900xt.. Big boost in fps in all the games I play and not only that they are a lot smoother as well.. Would need to do some side by sides with my old card but not sure if I can be bothered still more than happy with the performance especially in 4k

Cheers for an excellent video that presents some well-organized information. It’s abundantly clear that AMD made compromises with Navi 31. It’s interesting how nVidia provided a gapping hole that AMD felt they could fill even with a subpar offering. Taking AMD’s own comments into consideration it’s clear that they either planned on underclocking Navi 31, or were forced to in order to ship by Q422. AMD might release an iterative version with a faster clock speed, but that will do little to redeem their once sterling reputation. My take on this parallels the comments made by “High Yield”. I’m guessing that AMD knew they had to bite the bullet to introduce the very first GPU chiplet design. Because power requirements for nVidia’s Lovelace architecture were so insanely high, AMD sought to offer a GPU that was somewhat below most folk’s expectation of 50% improvement over Navi 2, while also consuming far less power than nVidia’s new GPUs. AMD likely assumed their lower power consumption combined with much lower retail pricing for Navi 3 would make it a no brainer, at least until benchmarks showed the actual performance, which is *always lower* than what manufacturers show during keynotes. I mean seriously, have community benchmarks ever exceeded keynote expectations? That said, when I consider how much additional engineering went into AMD’s first chiplet-based GPU design, there’s likely some extra performance hiding in Navi 3. It’s difficult to assume otherwise when we consider how rushed Navi 3 appears at first glance? Requiring any processor to go off-die to access cache will impact performance, but AMD has bet the farm that their chiplet approach will work even for high bandwidth ops like graphics processing. AMD will discover both the good and bad of what this architectural shift provides. As AMD continue developing drivers and probably more importantly, revving hardware with process improvements, Navi could far exceed its targeted 3Ghz clock does to provide some serious performance improvements. There’s likely some headroom built in to Navi 3 that will take time to unlock as AMD continues to refine what’s a brand new approach to GPU packaging. Phew! Sorry for the novel-length comment! I really enjoyed the video and appreciate all the time and effort that went into making it. Well done! 👏 👏👏

With the cost of current GPUs, I don't think I will upgrade from my Red Devil 6900, but I think there are some teething issues with this card and drivers (No, I do not believe AMD releases sub-par drivers, I have never had an issue), but because of the new memory setup, it is going to take some time to solve the issues. Kind of like my first gen Ryzen.

AMD's performance, as I've been saying since I joined the discussion, is that the performance envelop was smaller in the past generations comparatively between Nvidia and AMD. It came down to process. Nvidia chose to go with a better process from TSMC and proved the architecture of AMD will not have been better. TSMC is the winner here.

It's common tech companies release unfinished products and sell them to get the money to fix the issues.

Hopefully drivers update can take advantage of the chipset and increase its performance.

what went wrong? Expectations. Expectations from hopeful people believing leaks, and then AMD set expectations during their presser in october. If you have no expectations you're not disappointed. I had NONE because PR and leaks are not a final product review. Never board the hype train, never believe marketing PR. Both will get you disappointed. That said, I'm fairly sure AMD missed their own perf target by a third, they announced +50, they reached +35 so to reach +50 they'd have to improve A LOT. Still, I'm not disappointed :D I'll see what the product stack looks like because I may replace my 3080 or my 6600xt at some point soon (although I love the 6600xt)

They said up to. No lie was made. They are designed to not sell out. It's new tech. Support competition

I'm interested in RDNA 3 integrated graphics for a budget laptop.

I think there's another point to make: real heavy users (corporations) do not uses AMD for IA, deep learning, etc, beacause the majority of libraries realy on CUDA and the ROCm translation is not really good by now. This puts NVvidia WAAY ahead on the market that really buys flaship chips. So fighting for the top makes no sense by now. Maybe AMD will fight in price and performance with lower tier 4000 in the consumer market and use the experience to refine ROCm and chiplet design. I'm a researcher/engineer in electrical engeenering and computing. The amount of optimzations made for Intel CPUs and nvidia GPUs make literally impossible to choose other than this brands. Acctualy in the 5000 series ryzen the performance in CPU are equal, but in GPU not even close.

AMD recently said they have expanded the machines they test their Radeon (should be called ATI really) products for the first time to more machines than Nvidia. But we won't see those gains until later 2023 - 2024, since they are in the middle of testing. Not to mention management improvements, testing strategy, software, etc.

Rumors are that there was an artifact appearing in games after an hours or so run time that required AMD to put in stunt in the drivers impacting performance.

I believe that a lot of your ideas are correct or certainly close, I'm just not sure that it's going to be worth while for AMD to re design the silicone for this series. We will have to wait and see what happens I guess.

HUGE video!

What a nice channel man. Keep it up I'm enjoying the speculations on these pieces of silicon. But I still see navi31 as an ongoing investment for AMD to chiplet'ise their whole stack and make it bug-free in the long run against Intel and Nvidia with both on Monolithic dies. with ARM racing together to solve interconnect latency-power inefficiencies. Hope to see a revolution like Ryzen 3000-5000. Unless Nvidia (don't see intel prepared after seeing 14th gen) has a perfect working Chiplet GPU or server chip lineup somehow kept all secret. which I doubt

35% better than the previous generation and the video's title is "what went wrong"? My take: That's massive improvement..

I was looking in to GPU OPEN Documentation on RDNA3 but i have to dig in deeper and that takes time. Sapphire Nitro 7900XT should arrive soon. Trough some testing i hope to find out more. Bye

Lol this video didn’t age well, those Driver updates are already improving performance. And don’t forget about undervolting + OC. The 7900XTX beats out the 4080 in most Rasterized performance, and can almost catch the 4090 if it’s undervolted + OC’ed

I just returned a 6950xt one month ago (XFX). Unfortunately, it was faulty. I noted the main issue was about power. When it worked, it was impressive, then a lot of green screen and reboot. Can't pass 303w (instead 321w/340w full power stock settings). No way. Similar problem of a streamer with a 6950 gigabyte (stuck at 328 instead 350 or more). I'm starting to think about some old manifacturing mismatch of rdna2 still present on rdna3.

I can't believe this video doesn't have more views

Super video! Came on time right when I was deciding to switch from Nvidia to AMD for my next PC

To be honest, I think it’s not like they were lying, I just think their last tuning didn’t work out as well as they thought.

I believe that's they need to improve performance game by game, not a generic overall DX11 fixes like they do it.

You have to go with the product you have and not the product you want. When the original Phenom (Barcelona Architecture) processor came out it had a TLB bug and the BIOS fix could cost up to a 20% performance hit. At that time AMD made a comment about the difficulties of marrying a design to the process node. There are always errata and AMD is definitely not alone. If they can't patch with firmware or drivers then they can spin up another batch with a fixed design. Will AMD refresh with a patched design or just move on to RDNA4 instead? AMD is in a position to significantly undercut Nvidia because their design should be much cheaper to produce. I'm hoping AMD will make the 7900XTX a $699 card, not because of these issues, but because they can still make reasonable margins (to satisfy those investors) and drag Nvidia well in to the deep end.

What went wrong is that all the leakers were wrong about the shader count. They were right about the RTX 4090 but were wrong about the 7900XTX and XT. One has to wonder if it was purposefully midleading...given that they were right about the 4090. Also what went wrong is that AMD cherry picked benchmarks way more on this release than they did the RX 6000 series. As for the 5700XT it was targeting the 2070 but many reviewers put it against the 2070 Super anyway. It was indeed faster than the 2070 and $100.00 cheaper. Hmm about the transistor count....RDNA2 21 die has 5120 shaders...the RDNA2 31 die has 6144 shaders...does that sound like double the transistors to you? It would mean their CUs got LARGER with a new node if all 6144 shaders account for those 57 billion transistors...maybe some of the die is disabled.

7950 XTX OC is what we're waiting for. 👍✌️

What about the cache hierarchy which hasn't been doubled over RDNA 2, RDNA 3 is choking on its own memory bandwidth and this explains both the performance and power issues.

7900 XTX owner here, I'm enjoying my awesome GPU that takes 110w on idle desktop :D (previous generation also had issues with high refresh monitors, taking up to 50w on idle) While gaming I see a 30% performance uplift at the same wattage, compared to a 6900 XT LC (XTXH+18Gbps). One more thing I noticed is that if you force the GPU to stay on high clock speeds, lets say 3000Mhz, it's gona sacrifice memory speed... resulting in a lower framerate (core 2400Mhz higher FPS than 3000Mhz) could it be that there's not enough power on the board to maintain high memory and high clock speeds at the same time ?

6950xt would need a 7950 though. I'm a Nvidia supporter but I'd just like to point that out. Also pointed out that their chiplet lower cost design would be more apparent if they had a 12gb 7900, it'd be 400-500 bucks. VRAM and supporting bandwidth is what makes a card expensive these days.

Alright, time to wait for RDNA 4, see y'all next year

Like any new AMD architecture, it has its problems. The next driver versions as well as much higher clock speeds of 3.0Ghz + Ghz will bring a significant advantage over the competition. I've never owned any Nvidia product, I've been using ATI/AMD products since the early 90's. In terms of price and quality, the new architecture leaves no doubt as to who won the race. Yes. As Linus said, it's AMD time

Rdna3 is a let down i got a insane deal for a 7900xt hellhound. I don’t see much difference vs my 6800xt or my friends 6950xt. I had no high idle issues with my 6800xt. While my 7900xt for some reason idles at 100w and my memory clock speeds are really high only solution was lowering my secondary monitor to 60hz…Also helldivers seemed to only crash very consistently crash on navi31 cards specifically before a new driver addressed it. No issues on 6800xt from my experience .

I will preface this by acknowledging that I am, and have been an AMD/ATI fan for over 25 years. However, I think most of this is driver based. I have a feeling they noticed they were having issues and may have bogged down their performance in exchange for stability until they can get more real world data. I was expecting something like this considering it is the first chiplet based GPU. The pressure from tight chip availability and the decline of prices could have been a "corprate" stress point and could have been forced through. Either way, I have learned that my patience with them over the years has always paid off. When a company focuses more on innovation than just throwing money at the problem, there are going to be hiccups. I can see Nvidia having this same problem when they finally decide they have to move onto chiplets to remain cost competitive. I guess we will see.

Thus is exactly the nerdy content I am looking for

maybe performance and power draw will get better with newer drivers just like last gen? Who knows... we'll see in 6 months

i honestly think that's all rdna3 could give. I don't expect some magical rdna3-rev2 products that will be 20%-30% more performant than what we're seeing now.

Underrated ❤️

This is incomplete reasoning. The economic metric includes silicon cost per transistor, not just the total count of transistors. Monolithic dies suffer increasing defects as die size grows, making average cost per transistor to go up. AMD likely made a trade-off of adding more transistors at lower average price and some of those added transistors were likely just the overhead of the chiplet design (allowing smaller dies).

There is one more question...why it cost $1000 for not promised performance...