GEFORCE RTX 40-SERIES SHAPES UP
While we wait for RDNA 3, AMD has refreshed three cards, including its top dog, which is now bigger and meaner.
© AMD
WE NOW HAVE a new bestever Radeon graphics card, the RX 6950 XT. This threefan monster has, AMD says, “been engineered to deliver the ultimate 4K gaming experience”. Basically a refreshed 6900 XT, it is built around the same 7nm Navi21 GPU with 5,120 Stream Processors and 80 Compute Units. It is clocked faster though, with the game clock jumping from 2,015MHz to 2,100MHz, a four percent bump.
THIS SUMMER, we’ll see Nvidia’s next-gen RTX 40-series, armed with the first Ada Lovelace GPUs. The earlier than expected date means it won’t launch at the same time as AMD’s RDNA 3 cards, which no doubt suits both companies. The new GPUs range from the 18,432 core AD102 to the more modest 3,072 core AD107. Details are sketchy, but the first three cards will be top-tier ones, including the RTX 4090 with the AD102 and 24GB of GDD6X: the same memory configuration as the current RTX 3090 Ti (above). Power consumption could be 450W, not as insane as earlier rumors. We’re promised an epic performance, with up to twice the horsepower of the RTX 3090. The RTX 4080 and 4070 will use their own GPU dies, rather than cut-down ones, and both get memory upgrades, 16GB for the 4080, and 12GB for the 4070. We’ll have to wait for the 4060 and 4050, however. It appears the battle for graphical supremacy will start at the top.
The maximum boost speed gains 60Hz to 2,310MHz and although memory is the same, 16GB of GDDR6, it’s now 18Gbps rather than 16Gbps, while memory bandwidth rises from 512GB/s to 576GB/s. AMD quotes the ‘effective’ memory bandwidth using the Infinity cache, now 1,793.5GB/s, up from 1,664.2GB/s. That’s some useful extra bandwidth. All of these changes have pushed the power consumption to 335W, making this a physically big, and hot card.
–CL