While most of this morning's AMD Computex keynote has been on its third-generation Ryzen CPU's and their Zen 2 architecture, the company made time to discuss its highly anticipated NAVI GPU architecture and the products that fall under it. AMD was careful not to divulge all the details, but it did give us enough information to get more excited and hyped up for the full reveal soon.
At the event, AMD announced its NAVI Radeon GPU range, starting with the RX 5700 and a brand-new RDNA 7nm architecture. The new GPU will use an enhanced compute design, which claims to offer better efficiency and IPC with a multi-level cache hierarchy resulting in lower power consumption, higher bandwidth, and reduced latency.
AMD has been hard at work improving its GPU architecture to enhance both the effective IPC and memory bandwidth efficiency. In what the company is calling its Radeon DNA (RDNA) architecture, AMD also revealed that Navi's compute units have been re-engineered.
Compared with RX Vega, AMD said Navi offers 1.5x performance per watt and 25% better performance per clock. The GPU will also be the first PCI-E 4.0-enabled gaming GPU, which makes a perfect match with AMD's new third-gen Ryzen CPUs and X570 motherboards.
It's quite noticeable that Navi is now going to be better known as RDNA, as that's what the company has been calling the architecture at the event.
The Radeon RX 5700 series will have GDDR6 memory and support PCIe 4.0 (it's unclear if either of those will make a big difference but newer versions are always nice). AMD isn't offering much in the way of concrete details on performance, but they are showing it off versus NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2070 in the AMD-favorable game Strange Brigade.
Finally, while AMD isn't giving us concrete performance information, the company did use its Computex keynote to briefly demonstrate performance on the card versus NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2070, a video card that costs $500.
While this is a game that favors AMD to begin with, it's a promising sign that they're able to pull ahead of mid-to-high-end NVIDIA card by 10%. Which means we're all going to be eagerly awaiting more information on the video card as AMD ramps up for their July launch.
We'll catch more of AMD in its E3 2019 Next Horizon Gaming Event on June 10. For remote attendees, AMD will be streaming the Next Horizon Gaming event through their YouTube channel. Meanwhile AMD is also opening the doors to the local public at 3pm PST (22:00 UTC).
