A tipster has claimed that AMD's next-gen graphics cards may not be as powerful as previously rumored. AMD is set to release its RDNA 3 GPUs later this year as successors to the current-gen Radeon RX 6000-series cards that were released in late 2020. The first-generation RDNA cards were launched in 2019 as the successor to the older Radeon RX Vega series graphics cards. AMD is expected to base both the RDNA 3 cards and the Zen 4 CPUs on TSMC's 5nm process.
There's been an acute shortage in graphics card supply over the past couple of years, but there are signs that things could be changing for the better. A report from a few weeks ago suggested that the entry-level AMD Radeon RX 6500XT is selling below its MSRP in Germany, while prices of various other GPUs are also rationalizing. However, things still might not normalize in the foreseeable future, with Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger recently saying in an interview that he expects the ongoing chip shortage to continue until 2024.
The latest rumors about AMD's upcoming graphics card lineup come from well-known tipster Greymon55, who posted a series of numbers that are said to be the core counts for the three top RDNA 3 cards. The numbers were backed up later in the day by another tipster Redfire, who posted some more info about the upcoming cards. According to the tweets, the cards will ship with much fewer cores than previously thought. If the information from the two tipsters is correct, the Navi 31 (possibly the RX 7900 XT) with 6 Shader Engines, 12 Shader Arrays and 48 Work Group Processors will come with up to 12,288 Stream Processors, which is about 20 percent lower than the 15,360 cores that were rumored earlier.
AMD RDNA 3 GPUs: Rumored Specifications
As for the Navi 32 (expected to be the RX 7800 XT), it will come with 4 Shader Engines, 8 Shader Arrays, 32 Work Group Processors and up to 8,192 Stream Processors, down from the expected 10,240. The only chip that's expected to retain its previously-rumored numbers is the Navi 33, which will ship with 2 Shader Engines, 4 Shader Arrays, 16 Work Group Processors and up to 4096 Stream Processors.
Following Greymon55's tweet, German tech site 3DCenter.org tweeted out what the revised numbers could mean for the performance of the flagship RDNA 3 card. According to the tweet, the flagship Navi 31 could offer up to 73 TFLOPS of power on 3GHz GPU clock speed. If true, it would be a significant drop from the expected 92 TFLOPS of performance the card was earlier expected to offer. If the rumored numbers are correct, it will be interesting to see if the new AMD cards will be able to better the performance provided by the next-gen Nvidia GPUs.
Source: Greymon55/Twitter, Redfire/Twitter, 3DCenter.Org/Twitter