Discussion RDNA4 + CDNA3 Architectures Thread

[DisEnchantment]

With the GFX940 patches in full swing since first week of March, it is looking like MI300 is not far in the distant future!
Usually AMD takes around 3Qs to get the support in LLVM and amdgpu. Lately, since RDNA2 the window they push to add support for new devices is much reduced to prevent leaks.
But looking at the flurry of code in LLVM, it is a lot of commits. Maybe because US Govt is starting to prepare the SW environment for El Capitan (Maybe to avoid slow bring up situation like Frontier for example)

See here for the GFX940 specific commits

History for llvm/lib/Target/AMDGPU - llvm/llvm-project

The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies. - History for llvm/lib/Target/AMDGPU - llvm/llvm-project

github.com

Or Phoronix

More AMD "GFX940" Enablement Work Landing In LLVM - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

There is a lot more if you know whom to follow in LLVM review chains (before getting merged to github), but I am not going to link AMD employees.

I am starting to think MI300 will launch around the same time like Hopper probably only a couple of months later!
Although I believe Hopper had problems not having a host CPU capable of doing PCIe 5 in the very near future therefore it might have gotten pushed back a bit until SPR and Genoa arrives later in 2022.
If PVC slips again I believe MI300 could launch before it

This is nuts, MI100/200/300 cadence is impressive.



Previous thread on CDNA2 and RDNA3 here

Question - Speculation: RDNA3 + CDNA2 Architectures Thread

Man I have been dying to make this one for a while now. First rumours for RDNA3 are here so new thread time! Just going to start off with this one for now: kopite7kimi on Twitter: "@VideoCardz Ah, I mean a simple mcm design with 10240 cores is not enough. Because the lift from RDNA2 to RDNA3...

forums.anandtech.com

 

[adroc_thurston]

So am I correct in assuming that RDNA4 will be facing off Battlemage this year?

facing off?

 

[MrTeal]

That would actually be mildly disruptive to the market.

I call shenanigans!

7600 XT with 16GB is only 10% above that at $330, so getting 40% more performance to match a 7700 XT at the same basic price doesn't seem that wildly out of line. That's a bit more than the uplift from the 6700 XT to the 7700XT, and MSRP on the 7700XT was slightly lower as well.

 

[igor_kavinski]

facing off?

I've read that BM has some revolutionary raytracing tech.

 

[adroc_thurston]

I've read that BM has some revolutionary raytracing tech.

how is this relevant for mainstream parts

 

[igor_kavinski]

how is this relevant for mainstream parts

It could be if BM's RT is almost zero hit to raster perf.

 

[adroc_thurston]

It could be if BM's RT is almost zero hit to raster perf.

how is this relevant for mainstream parts (also no, you can't, RTRT stuff inherently hates GPUs as a concept)

 

[Mahboi]

It's most bad RDNA3 card, there is RTX 4060 for same price already. At least hope N44 with perfomance around 7700XT for 300$ would be fine.

The subject has been done to death (at least, I remember beating that horse to death, rebirth, and at least several more deaths and rebirths like a boss in a Resident Evil game), but I'd put the 7700 xt as the most "nope" pricing on any RDNA 3 card, followed by the 7600 and the 7900 xt.
It still quite boggles my mind how the XTX was "good" only versus a horribly priced 4080, and now is just ok vs the 4080 Super, and the 7800 xt is by quite a lot the best deal of the generation.

It's one card that's way too generous and 4 that range from decent to just plain bad. The pricing policies are "tie your feet to the ceiling and let the blood come down to your head until it makes sense" tier.

facing off?

How about "So am I correct in assuming that RDNA4 will be driving to its featherweight duel vs Nvidia's low-mid range while Papa Pat takes its little Battlemage ducklings across the road, and they'll all end up splattered under the wheels without Radeon noticing"?

 

[Hans Gruber]

It has been said that Battlemage will fix everything that was wrong within the ARC hardware. Radeon cards game well, but that's it. Those Intel cards do it all well. Obviously, Nvidia has nothing to fear but down the road Intel may be able to catch up. I think AMD is focused mostly on margins and pleading poverty.

Of the three video card companies. Intel cards look best followed by AMD and then Nvidia in my opinion. I am talking the colors and how the games are rendered on screen. I have fairly strong opinions about AMD drivers. It's not as bad as people think but there are problems gamers encounter that should not exist. Nvidia is just reliable. Their drivers are hard to break and I am good at breaking things. AMD drivers are fragile but if you stay in the lines, they work quite well.

 

[gdansk]

It has been said that Battlemage will fix everything that was wrong within the ARC hardware.

By whom? I want to laugh at them in 9 months.

 

[adroc_thurston]

Those Intel cards do it all well

At merely twice the area.
But who cares about area in client gfx amirite

 

[Mahboi]

It has been said that Battlemage will fix everything that was wrong within the ARC hardware. Radeon cards game well, but that's it. Those Intel cards do it all well.

At what time of the day did they say that, and after how much Rum?
You'd think that after Alchemist was months or over a year late, and proved to be a complete disaster, you'd at least see a general skepticism. Nope.
Somehow Intel's big brass Engineering Madskills will just power through the 20+ years of driver development delay they have over Radeon/Geforce. And they'll RT as well as NV. And be offering costs as good as AMD.
And they'll perform a deep tissue massage and an Intel employee will come give you a spa massage once a month.

Oh and I forget: not only is the software stack simply not even close to on par (that is, today, early 2024, I'm not talking about Alchemist anymore), but the hardware itself is in need of more than one or two iterations to get competitive with either of the others.

Can't deny that AMD is aiming for margins and pleading poverty though, that's certainly true.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Of the three video card companies. Intel cards look best followed by AMD and then Nvidia in my opinion. I am talking the colors and how the games are rendered on screen.

Anyone else wanna chime in on this bit? Is Intel really that far ahead in visual quality? nVideah being last means they are cutting corners in the display engine to process pixels faster?

 

[DaaQ]

Anyone else wanna chime in on this bit? Is Intel really that far ahead in visual quality? nVideah being last means they are cutting corners in the display engine to process pixels faster?

Kinda sounds like it. I can't comment on intel or AMD cards. the only AMD card I had was the what was that one, before the 7970?? 5870 maybe? put it in son's computer. Since I had snagged a GTX 570 before the builds were complete. Yea I think that was it. Because I bought 2 GTX 560 ti maybe the 444 variant. I can't remember, maybe 1 560ti and one of the beefed up variant.
I never heard of complaints from the one with the AMD card like driver wise. Ran Oblivion and also Skyrim.

He had my old LCD monitor, and the colors did look better on it than when I had the 8800 GTX

 

[Hans Gruber]

At what time of the day did they say that, and after how much Rum?
You'd think that after Alchemist was months or over a year late, and proved to be a complete disaster, you'd at least see a general skepticism. Nope.
Somehow Intel's big brass Engineering Madskills will just power through the 20+ years of driver development delay they have over Radeon/Geforce. And they'll RT as well as NV. And be offering costs as good as AMD.
And they'll perform a deep tissue massage and an Intel employee will come give you a spa massage once a month.

Oh and I forget: not only is the software stack simply not even close to on par (that is, today, early 2024, I'm not talking about Alchemist anymore), but the hardware itself is in need of more than one or two iterations to get competitive with either of the others.

Can't deny that AMD is aiming for margins and pleading poverty though, that's certainly true.

Intel said there were hardware limitations in ARC Alchemist that were design flaws that software could not overcome. That's ok, it was the first generation card. ARC was closer to 2 years late rather than 1 year late. People should be comparing ARC cards to 30 series and RDNA2 cards. I read they were fixing those hardware design flaws that plagued Arc with Battlemage. I agree their drivers are behind both Nvidia and AMD but they are fixing them.

I have a 3 monitor setup. That makes it easier to break drivers, cause hangs and failures. Every card review has static gaming tests. You never read or hear about image quality tests. You never see them running multiple monitors or switching to the desktop while gaming. Those tests are never conducted. Waking your computer from a sleep state and seeing all the monitors turn on without delay. AMD has that down in spades. Nvidia is pretty good but Intel sucks in that regard.

AMD drivers have a hard time recovering from failed OC's or overclocking where it leads to a failure even though the GDDR6 memory is not failing. I think if you run Radeon cards bone stock. You would not have a driver crash. With Nvidia you hit a wall, it works or it doesn't but never crashes when you stop your OC just before the wall of failure. With AMD, you get a ghost in the machine effect. You have to run the AMD cleanup utility and reinstall the drivers to get rid of the ghost in the machine bug. I know it's an OCing bug because the GDDR6 doesn't artifact or crash right out of the box. For no reason after a couple hours of gaming the drivers will crash. It's an OCing software bug in Adrenalin software. That's why you read about people complaining about random AMD driver crashes.

Unlike a lot of people I think the AMD drivers are pretty great when you run AMD cards stock. AMD drivers are not like wine that gets better with age. Their driver team was behind the 8 ball for years. They made a lot of money and can now dedicate resources to fix their radeon drivers. But if people want to say AMD cards age like fine wine, ok.

 

[adroc_thurston]

Intel said there were hardware limitations in ARC Alchemist that were design flaws that software could not overcome.

well yeah gen12 is a bad baseline to build off.
PVC suffered the same fate.

AMD drivers have a hard time recovering from failed OC's or overclocking where it leads to a failure even though the GDDR6 memory is not failing

that's not a driver issue lmao.

 

[igor_kavinski]

that's not a driver issue lmao.

What is it then? I really would like to know please.

 

[adroc_thurston]

What is it then? I really would like to know please.

AMD has let's just say problems with GPU resets.

 

[Mahboi]

AMD has let's just say problems with GPU resets.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/1bsjm5a/letter_to_amd_ongoing_amd

Like this?

 

[adroc_thurston]

Like this?

not even quite that.

 

[Hans Gruber]

well yeah gen12 is a bad baseline to build off.
PVC suffered the same fate.

that's not a driver issue lmao.

It is a driver issues if the adrenaline software package does not function correctly with stable overclocks. Adrenaline software has an automatic overclock feature for the memory, GPU clock and fan curve. The fan curve (manually adjust) works perfectly. With GDDR6 memory, you do not need to push the GPU clock. GDDR6 memory overclocked can give 10-15% performance boost alone. When you overclock memory you get artifacts, micro stutters, ghost in the machine affects and a black screen if pushed too far.

With AMD, you get none of those GDDR6 errors. You get a good gaming experience and then for no reason at all it ends with a DX11 crash or some error report or your system crashes. Adrenaline software resets your overclocks back to stock settings for you and you do it all over again. The problem is the video card becomes unstable after a bunch of overclocking rounds. That is why I say the AMD drivers are fragile. If you stay within the lines, you should have a good gaming experience. That means running everything stock. To truly reset your adrenaline software, you have to uninstall the drivers using the AMD cleanup utility. Doing a full removal with the utility removes the ghost in the machine effect.

I fully understand overclocking can lead to system instability. AMD has that message before selecting auto overclocking in Adrenaline. Even when manually clocked, the system becomes unstable when it was stable for many hours. I am speaking to the memory overclock specifically because that is where all the benefits come from with GDDR6 memory. Going from 1750mhz to 1770mhz should not cause instability in GDDR6 memory in my opinion. Adrenaline does the auto overclock of the memory up to 1830mhz. If any minor memory overclock leads to instability, I am putting it on the software package.

All you have to do is google adrenaline drivers crashes. It's all over the web. Supposedly they fixed the issue a couple of years ago but people with RDNA3 cards are complaining about driver issues. My guess is they were using adrenaline to overclock their cards. A visually stable overclock that runs flawlessly for hours and then it crashes out of nowhere. With Nvidia, the overclocking is binary. It either works or it doesn't work. If it's unstable you will see it right away. In afterburner you lower the overclock and the system runs smoothly and you quickly find your wall.

With Intel, they have a fancy dashboard with a bunch of features, none of them work. You cannot even overclock the GDDR6 memory with the Intel cards. Supporting that absent feature would increase ARC card performance by 10-15%. All you have to do is look at old reviews of the 1660Ti vs 1660super. The Super has the GDDR6 while the 1660ti has the buffed GPU core without GDDR6 memory. When you overclock the 1660 super memory, it's magic.

The 7900 GRE just got buffed with the GDDR6 memory modules via a adrenaline driver software update. The memory limitation was bumped from 2300mhz up to 3000mhz. Sounds great but if the adrenaline software introduces issues because of software flaws. There are going to be a lot of unhappy customers if they get driver crashes. I call it driver crashes because the adrenaline software package includes radeon/adrenaline drivers. I am not saying 3000mhz should be attainable. If people start getting crashes bumping the 7900GRE up to 2500mhz and get crashes, that is a software/driver problem and not a memory module limit issue.

Back in the day, I could move the memory slider all the way up with my Radeon 7950. That card is almost 14 years old. It cannot achieve any overclock anymore but runs stable at stock settings. So I have a baseline and a good understanding of what hardware and silicon/memory degradation can do over many years of use.

 

[Ghostsonplanets]

So, uh...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1776244864856051785

Navi 48:

32
64
256
693
2770
~240 mm²

Navi 44

16
32
128
288
515
~130 mm²


Navi 44 die size 130mm²... WTF

>7600 performance in a 130mm² die size??? WOW!!!

 

[SolidQ]

>7600 performance in a 130mm² die size??? WOW!!!

if you notice there is 2x>>

16WGP/32CU/128bit
but what mean 288/515?

 

[jpiniero]

16WGP/32CU/128bit
but what mean 288/515?

32 gbps GDDR7 as an theoretical option I guess.

 

[SolidQ]

32 gbps GDDR7 as an theoretical option I guess.

ok now i get it
288 - Bandwidth
2515 core speed

Seems WGP is real reworked, if it's faster than 7600XT, despite both have same Bandwidth

 

[jpiniero]

Seems WGP is real reworked, if it's faster than 7600XT, despite both have same Bandwidth

Or the leakers are just making assumptions based upon raw specs that aren't true.