Why gamers should consider waiting for AMD RDNA 3 and Radeon 7000 series

RDNA generational road map (image via AMD)
RDNA generational road map (Image via AMD)

AMD's upcoming RDNA 3 and Radeon 7000 series have a lot to offer. The next-generation GPU architecture is set to bring massive improvements in both performance and power efficiency.

AMD is set to release RDNA 3 GPUs on November 3, 2022. This likely means they will hit the shelves in late November or early December.

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Why should gamers wait for the release of AMD's new architecture before buying anything else? Well, there are a few reasons.

Firstly, it will bring a number of significant improvements over the current RDNA 2 architecture. These include a new compute unit design, support for ray-tracing, and a new memory controller.

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Secondly, AMD has confirmed that RDNA 3 will offer a “significant” increase in performance over RDNA 2. This is something that gamers will definitely want to take advantage of.

Thirdly, RDNA 3 will be more power-efficient than its predecessor. This is important for gamers who want to keep their energy bills down.

Note: This article is subjective and solely reflects the opinions of the writer


What the Radeon 7000 series and RDNA 3 bring to the table

Architecture

The Radeon RX 7000 series will be built around AMD's new RDNA 3 microarchitecture. According to recent speculation, RX 7000 graphics cards may be up to 130% quicker than their predecessors while still being reasonably power-efficient.

AMD has announced that the new GPU series will provide more than a 50% increase in performance per watt over the previous generation. Additionally, its adoption of the 5nm manufacturing process has been confirmed and should contribute to this performance improvement.

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RDNA 3 will utilize a new chipset design from AMD's Ryzen CPU architecture. The brand was able to increase the number of computing units on each die, thanks to this improvement in architecture.

Gamers can expect AMD's GPUs to launch with at least 12GB of VRAM if everything else remains the same. The company has previously asserted that 12GB of RAM in GPUs is the absolute minimum needed to play AAA games in the long run. As GDDR6X memory is now shipped with AMD GPUs, users can anticipate it to be the same as Radeon RX 7000.

Unlike RDNA 2, which is also available on gaming consoles, RDNA 3 is likely to be exclusive to PC users. This is due to the fact that consoles have a shelf life of four to six years, during which time the actual processing and graphics technology is frequently not changed.

However, we do expect to see mobile versions of the Radeon RX 7000 series for laptop gaming, even though the next-generation GPU architecture won't be coming to consoles.


Projected performance

AMD previously said that the transition from its GCN architecture to first-gen RDNA resulted in a significant 50% increase in performance per watt.

The company added that the transition from RDNA to the current RDNA 2 design brought about an additional 50% gain. With the switch from RDNA 2 to RDNA 3, the performance per watt is also anticipated to increase by over 50%.

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Despite the approaching release date, AMD hasn't disclosed anything about the GPU specifications.

The flagship GPU will reportedly include 96MB of Infinity Cache, which promises a huge Infinity Cache. It may even include a 384-bit memory bus, along with 256-bit and 128-bit Navi 32 and Navi 33 memory busses. According to earlier reports, players may see a 250% increase in performance over RDNA 2.

There are no leaked benchmarks to support these early hypotheses yet. However, if AMD can double the number of computing units and stream processors using the chipset design transferred from its CPUs, we can expect some significant improvements in graphics performance.


Conclusion

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RDNA 3 will likely go much further in terms of efficiency. While a few reports claim that Navi 31 may feature a TDP of 450W, nothing has been confirmed yet.

However, if this is the case, it is better for gamers to wait for the next lineup from Team Red so that they can get something more power-efficient than its previous offerings.

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Edited by Rachel Syiemlieh