Well, if this wasn't an early warning shot to make Nvidia sit up and pay attention then I don't know what is. That's because a new report has just broken cover that states that AMD's "upcoming flagship GPUs should be 3x faster than RX 6900XT".
That's 3x faster than the GPU that in T3's best graphics cards buying guide we say is the "best premium AMD graphics card".
That means that the next-gen of AMD graphics cards are, if this report is to be believed, will be three times faster than the current king of the AMD GPU world, the RX 6900XT and, arguably even more importantly, should leave the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 in the dust.
With three times the power of the RX 6900XT, the new flagship AMD GPU should also dethrone the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, too. As such, this is very much a shots fired situation and, at least on paper, something for Nvidia to be concerned about, and especially so considering the ongoing stock issues Nvidia graphics cards are facing.
The core of the report, which comes courtesy of arstechnica (opens in new tab), is based on information from wccftech (opens in new tab), who itself reported information spilled by serial graphics card information leakster @KittyYYuko on Twitter. That tweet can be seen directly below:
2.5x is too little.Take a guess :pMay 2, 2021
In the leakster's reply to Twitter user Paul Eccleston's comments about these next-gen AMD GPUs, @KittyYYuko stated that "2.5x is too little", which led wccftech to postulate that "this suggests that the next-generation flagship could end up almost 3 times faster".
This extra speed, if true, is likely due to the shift of these incoming "Navi 31" graphics cards to a 5nm architecture from a 7nm one, which has been shown to deliver huge performance gains and greater performance-per-watt gains, too.
In terms of raw numbers, the current Navi 21 flagship delivers 80 compute units and 5,120 shading units, while the incoming Navi 31 is slated to double those numbers up to 160 compute units and 10,000 shading units. And, at least according to these reports, that doubling in partnership with the shift to 5nm will lead to three-times greater performance.
And, well, three times greater performance will absolutely take the fight firmly to Nvidia's current Ampere GPUs. Whether or not Nvidia has something up its sleeve to combat these new AMD cards is unknown right now, and considering that these AMD cards aren't expected until late 2022 at the earliest suggests that the battle is far from won already.
Here's hoping that when these AMD cards do drop gamers don't face the awful stock issues that so far have seen thousands of scalpers drink champagne while passionate PC gamers are left empty handed.
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