Some troubling rumors are popping up right ahead of the Radeon RX 7900 series launch. Multiple reports of Navi 31 suffering from a design flaw that adversely affects the GPU clocks. More recently, a prominent tipster claimed that the power profile of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX might cause the clocks to underperform. This may or may not be true, but at the end of the day, AMD has once again been kicked out of the enthusiast GPU segment.
The RX 7900 series will compete with the RTX 4080 and 4070 Ti, and that too barely. Ray tracing performance leaves much to be desired. AMD is catching up to the Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3090/3090 Ti a whole generation later. The Ada Lovelace offerings are in a league of their own regarding ray-tracing performance.
According to the above Tweet by “All the Watts!”, Navi 31 (the die powering the RX 7900 series) will require a retape to fix all the hardware bugs. This implies that AMD will have to revise the IC design, essentially the same as planning a refresh. RDNA 3+ will supposedly address all the design flaws of Navi 31 (in 2023?).
Some of the flaws may be inherent in the RDNA 3 graphics microarchitecture, sneaking into the lower-end Navi 32/33 die. The whole dual-issue scheduling may be to blame for this. As seen over the years, no amount of simulated “threads” can replace actual hardware units.
Please note that this is a rumor. Take it with a healthy chunk of skepticism.
