After a mostly positive response for the 1st gen RDNA ‘Navi’ GPUs with the RX 5000 series, we have some more good news. RDNA 1 couldn’t quite compete with the flagships from NVIDIA which might change with the ‘Big Navi’ RDNA 2 GPUs.
This news comes in the form of the leak from AquariusZi which states the GPU will have a massive 505mm2 die size. This will translate to roughly 2X the performance of the RX 5700 XT with its 251mm2 die size, this is even without considering the efficiency improvements going from RDNA1 to RDNA 2. Therefore we can expect a performance jump that is quite substantial.
However, we have to consider the hardware-accelerated raytracing that AMD promised will be included with RDNA 2. So the entire 505mm2 won’t be fully utilized to house Compute cores exclusively. As we have seen with Nvidia and their inclusion of Tensor (AI) Cores and Ray-Tracing (RT) cores with Turing. Although AMD might take the GPGPU approach to ray-tracing which is more versatile.
A whole lot of AMD GPUs have passed the RRA certifications recently implying the release isn’t too far out. This is different from last time where they released only two tiers of the RX 5000 GPUs. We also know that Nvidia is playing the waiting game before they let their ‘Ampere’ cat out of the bag. We also know that four codenames have been leaked in an EEC filing which can be subject to change. The codenames are RX 5950XT, RX 5950, RX 5900, and the RX 5800.
We also have a leaked VR benchmark from CubeVR which might be the GPU in question and it also shows a promising card to keep our eyes peeled for.