AMD is launching the Big Navi graphics card later this year, and that means there are more rumours about its prospective performance, launch date, and pricing than there are pins on a Ryzen 4000 CPU.
The voracious rumour mill needs feeding after all. So it’s no great surprise that as much as there are detailed, genuine leaks popping up every now and then, sometimes via engineers, sometimes via a company’s PR team, there are also the rumour trolls.
And that looks like what we’ve got here from a few slides thrown together, tossed out to some YouTubers, and made public over at Moore’s Law is Dead. To be fair, after discussing the slides they do admit they’re likely faked.
Which is no surprise as there are just three slides and each one is as dubious-looking as the next. Starting with the initial specs and price list, which uses the recently unveiled new Radeon branding right at the top. See, super real. Except that branding doesn’t extend to the card pictured which bears the old branding on a shroud that looks exactly like an RX 5700 reference card slapped on top of an image of a water-cooled Vega GPU.
Admittedly, this wouldn’t be the first time AMD had messed up a new GPU slide, after all at its E3 presentation last year it still had images calling the RX 5700 XT an RX 690…
Under the branding is a set of specs that aren’t a million miles away from all the rumoured numbers we’ve been hearing since there was first speculation about a high-end GPU based on the Navi graphics architecture. To be honest, we could have cobbled that together ourselves back in August/September last year.
Then we’ve got the actual performance slides. The first is a straight 4K gaming performance graph, highlighting ten different games and the RX 6900XT’s relative performance compared with Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Ti. For reference, it’s sometimes as much as 52% faster than the flagship Turing GPU, and will only cost $999. Bargain.
The next slide is about the real-time ray tracing performance of RDNA 2, and the fact that at worst you’ll get 91% of the non-ray traced frame rate performance in the current suite of DXR-enable games. Seems like RXRT, if that is what AMD’s marketing department feels it ought to call RDNA 2’s ray tracing implementation, isn’t going to have the performance penalty of Turing’s RT Cores.
Honestly, I have no clue as to the veracity of those numbers.
They feel like they could just be plucked from the air as much as from a genuine set of benchmark figures. But the slides themselves definitely look all kinds of fake. The amount of aliasing on the headline text itself is what calls out to me, something that AdoredTV also pointed to. It claims to have seen the exact same slides, and chose not to immediately cover them, for all the reasons I’ve already alluded to.
As much as these slides seem bogus, Big Navi is coming this year, and stands a good chance of delivering gaming performance to give Turing some concerns. Luckily for Nvidia it’s going to have its consumer-facing Ampere GPUs to face off against it. And whatever happens between the two graphics card heavyweights it’s looking more and more like a golden age of 4K gaming is looming large.