The market launch of the AMD Radeon Navi series is expected in the second half of the year and is regarded as one of the most important events in the technological world. We are not exaggerating, as we indicated in the title, this graphics generation will bring Xbox Scarlett and PS5 to life and also represents a new starting point at the architectural level.
As we have mentioned on previous occasions, the AMD Radeon Navi series will mark the abandonment of the GCN architecture, a classic that Sunnyvale has cultivated since the Radeon HD 7000 series and which, as many of our readers will know, was the key to building the PS4-PS4 Pro and Xbox One-Xbox One X consoles.
The use of a new architecture often has serious consequences, usually resulting in higher gross performance. Put simply, this means that an AMD Radeon Navi GPU must offer superior performance per shader compared to the Radeon VII, the most powerful graphics card currently sold by the Sunnyvale giant.
The result is that a graphics card with fewer navigation-based shaders should work better than a graphics card with more shaders based on earlier architectures. Thanks to earlier leaks, we could see that the mid-size AMD Radeon Navi models would work like the high-end Radeon RX Vega, and a new performance test in CompuBench reinforces this idea.
It lists an AMD Radeon Navi with 20 arithmetic units. If Sunnyvale were to maintain 64 shaders per CU, it would have a total of 1,280 shaders, a number that fits into a mid-range and lower-range model. Despite its low shader count, it is able to outperform the RX 580, which has a total of 2,304 shaders, and remains at a similar level to the Radeon RX Vega 56, which we remember has a whopping 3,584 shaders.
When we talk about processing power, the AMD Radeon Navi loses ground and is far below the Radeon RX Vega 56, a fact that fits in with the information we’ve heard so far, and that everything will focus on the new AMD architecture. This is understandable not only because this generation will support Xbox Scarlett and PS5, but also because it enables Sunnyvale to simplify Navi’s silicon design and reduce costs.
We should not forget that Navi will be manufactured on a 7 nm process, in addition, an important leap that is associated with the change in architecture should allow a significant increase in performance, which will reduce consumption and work temperatures.