AMD tease two dates in October for Zen 3 and RDNA 2

I hope RDNA 2 / Navi 2 will be more polished than RDNA 1 release. Less hardware bugs and such. Surely looking forward to it.

On the CPU side though, those who already have high end Zen 2 CPUs probably won't be in a rush to upgrade.

I keep hearing about Navi being buggy, I haven't find bugs on my navi. Maybe I hit the silicon lottery? is there any documentation about the bugs? are there any workarounds?

Yes, I expect it to be silicon lottery. Some get worse hardware than others. The point is, with first generation of microarchitecture, chances of getting bad hardware are higher.


Last edited by Shmerl on 9 September 2020 at 7:31 pm UTC

You can find some details about known hardware hazards:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/master/src/amd/compiler/README-ISA.md#rdna-gfx10-hazards

And probably not all of them were found or worked around yet.


Last edited by Shmerl on 9 September 2020 at 7:32 pm UTC

If the rumors about the Navi2 reveal tomorrow are true these could be the release dates for the new CPUs and GPUs. Which would explain why they are so "far" away.

I keep hearing about Navi being buggy, I haven't find bugs on my navi. Maybe I hit the silicon lottery? is there any documentation about the bugs? are there any workarounds?

I booted into windows for the first time in 5 years and kept getting BSODs on my Vega64. Which only happen when I have 3 monitors on. Turn off a monitor? Rock solid. Found forum posts describing this from over a year ago. While the Navi launch was a bit bumpy on linux, AMD drivers on windows have perpetually been a disaster for every GPU after polaris. A lot of the "Navi is terrible, worst thing ever" stuff is Windows drivers related. Not that there arent any hardware gotchas, or linux driver issues (see shmerl's post for references), but I've mostly heard positive things about Navi on linux recently.

I hope they will release GPUs that do not need too much power this time.

Yeah, I hope they keep power usage in check and won't go after power creep like Nvidia did with new cards.

I wish I live in a country where I could afford buy bleeding edge tech, so I could read news like this without think "Cool, but I can't buy it anyway" :(

On topic: I hope AMD continue to stand with a good market share against Nvidia, while continue to be friendly with open source graphics

Less hardware bugs and such.

I keep hearing about Navi being buggy, I haven't find bugs on my navi. Maybe I hit the silicon lottery? is there any documentation about the bugs? are there any workarounds?

Most of those reports are from Windows users, or Linux users using outdated (not bleeding edge) drivers.

I was still getting gpu driver crashes from time to time on 5700XT. I sold it a month ago to someone on Windows and they haven't had any problems (I told them they could return the GPU if it was hardware and was problematic for them). I was switching between mesa stable/mesa-git, aco/llvm, amdvlk/radv and linux stable/rc candidates, but it was never fully stable for me. My plan is to get RDNA2 as it would be good to get great performance on 1440p again (RX 580 only on lighter games has solid FPS).


Last edited by TapocoL on 10 September 2020 at 1:44 am UTC

I hope they will release GPUs that do not need too much power this time.

Yeah, I hope they keep power usage in check and won't go after power creep like Nvidia did with new cards.

Well, they probably will have a card at a power level you want, but it remains to be seen whether that will be at a performance level you want. As long as their silicon can take it and they can slap a big enough heat sink on it, they'll probably have a 300+-ish watt unit at the top end to compete better with the 3080 and not leave performance on the table. So, if you don't want that, you'll have to take a lesser part. It may not be substantially lesser, as power usage goes way up faster then performance does, but that's a tradeoff you'll have to consider.

One thing to note - GPU's are a relatively low margin product for AMD. MM for MM of silicon, CPU's are way more profitable, and have a lot less headaches with regard to software development needed to sustain them. The higher the performance they can get out of each mm of gpu silicon they sell, the higher the profit margin they can get out of the unit. That means leaving a lot of thermal headroom on the table is lost revenue on a thin-er margin product. Naturally there are real limits to how much juice they can run with, namely folks will only tolerate so much noise, and the 12-volt rails of system PSU's can only put out so much power, but within those limits, they get the highest performance they can to be able to charge higher prices for their products.


Last edited by yokem55 on 10 September 2020 at 6:11 am UTC

Well, they probably will have a card at a power level you want, but it remains to be seen whether that will be at a performance level you want. As long as their silicon can take it and they can slap a big enough heat sink on it, they'll probably have a 300+-ish watt unit at the top end to compete better with the 3080 and not leave performance on the table. So, if you don't want that, you'll have to take a lesser part

For example for Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 XT, power requirements are listed as 241 W.

https://www.sapphiretech.com/en/consumer/pulse-radeon-rx-5700-xt-8g-gddr6#Specification

I'd rather not go much higher than that. So hopefully AMD will have some card that's better than RX 5700 XT but isn't too power hungry. I don't need 4K performance.


Last edited by Shmerl on 10 September 2020 at 6:49 am UTC

I hope they will release GPUs that do not need too much power this time.

Yeah, I hope they keep power usage in check and won't go after power creep like Nvidia did with new cards.

Those new cards are around 100watts and more thirstier than the 20 series those 550 and 650 watt PSUs might not cut it if you go beyond a RTX 3070.

Would consider AMD GPU if the figures and power darw stack up, and the Ray Tracing is decent and supported.
Built current rig ready for next CPU gen of Ryzen so that's settled, GPU open to AMD if its competiitive on Price/Performance.
Ironically for Nvidia, as yet AMD is only platform to run the 30 series on PCIE 4, not that it would make much if any difference over PCIE 3 as yet.

Well, they probably will have a card at a power level you want, but it remains to be seen whether that will be at a performance level you want. As long as their silicon can take it and they can slap a big enough heat sink on it, they'll probably have a 300+-ish watt unit at the top end to compete better with the 3080 and not leave performance on the table. So, if you don't want that, you'll have to take a lesser part

For example for Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 XT, power requirements are listed as 241 W.

https://www.sapphiretech.com/en/consumer/pulse-radeon-rx-5700-xt-8g-gddr6#Specification

I'd rather not go much higher than that. So hopefully AMD will have some card that's better than RX 5700 XT but isn't too power hungry. I don't need 4K performance.

1440P seems to be the sweet spot along with the Ultrawides, I find 2560 x 1080 a good compromise as not a huge load over Full HD my RTX2060 Super will do until we see what's coming up, one of my sons asked why was I insisten on 850 watt PSU, told them better to have the capacity, plus running a psu at 50% its usually at its most efficient.

Actually I am more excited to see what is coming in at the lower end. Specifically Athlon APU the 3000 G was a staggering surprise 720p gaming on 35 watt processor in esports titles i grant you but with only 3 graphics cores available and all for 40 pounds amazing. I am very interested to see what the next Athlon hold perhaps quad core with maybe an extra cu to make it a vega 4 if the pricing and thermals stay at those previous levels am def building rig based on that to see what it can do with overclocks.

Less hardware bugs and such.

I keep hearing about Navi being buggy, I haven't find bugs on my navi. Maybe I hit the silicon lottery? is there any documentation about the bugs? are there any workarounds?

That was the one I suffered most from
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/929

Disappeared with 5.7.x but for some it seems to prevail.

I'm very excited about the Zen 3 announcement, I want to be rid of my 9900k (crazy temps & power consumption making my life a misery in summer, although it warms my home office in winter :) ). My main hope is they drop the motherboard fan, and hit the 5GHz. With & 10 or 12 core parts, needing no more than a reasonable 130w would be awesome (since when is 130w reasonable ? :p ).

For RDNA 2, I just can't get excited. Somehow I feel it won't be any kind of real competitor to Ampere, wait and see I guess. But I don't think there's much hope to have with a 7nm to "7nm+" transition, to get better perf than 5700XT, they will have to raise power like crazy, which will probably bottleneck before they reach the 2080ti equivalent that the 3070 is, or at least not for the same power consumption at all.

what a coincidence this post gave the bad Mojo to my 5600xt, I swear it was rock stable for 1 month, now I got a Green Screen Of Death. Searched on google seems a fairly common issue, mostly happening on windows. To be honest I experienced this Green Screen of Death before, but only while overclocking, I thought it was only a normal overclocking issue that every gpu has when pushing clocks and voltages (to be fair polaris also had some issues when overclocking). So the culprit might have something to do with clocks or voltage, but this time I was not overclocking just watching a youtube video.

That means that your framebuffer is full of 00FF00. Another failure mode is when your framebuffer is full of FF00FF (magenta).

Will be interesting to see the price tags, esspecially for the GPUs, because there had to be a reason Microsoft picked it for the new XBox, so I hope both performance and price will be good.