RDNA 3 rumours Q3/4 2022

[Angilion]

Asking out of ignorance here not stirring the pot. If AMD have a card that competes with the 4090, what incentive do they have to price it lower? Knowing how 'loyal' people are to brands, wouldn't they just try and milk the early adopters first.

I read a lot of hopium that they are about to release a 4090 and charge hundreds less, seems unlikely is all.

There's a tiny vague hope that AMD will go for market share and (arguably more important) mindshare. They could. They're not very limited in supply for rdna3 and cards using it and they don't have large amounts of unsold rdna2 product. So they could go for increasing their market share and increasing their reputation and increasing their media coverage. That would be a potential way to increase profit, especially over a longer period of time. It's also extremely likely that AMD's production costs are significantly lower than nvidia's due to the quite different designs of the GPUs. So AMD probably could significantly undercut nvidia on price while maintaining high profit margins. Another possible approach would be to release a full range of rdna3 cards, including the far larger market for mainstream graphics cards. AMD doesn't have loads of rdna2 kit that they can't sell, so AMD's mainstream rdna3 cards would currently be competing against nvidia's 3000 series, not their own 6000 series. The biggest effect might not be a 7900XT that competes with a 4090 and sells for a lower price. It might be a 7700XT that outperforms a 3070 and sells for a lower price. If you had a choice between a 3070 at £600 or a 7700XT that outperforms a 3070 in every way, has double the amount of VRAM, uses less power, runs cooler and costs £500, which would you buy? Even nvidia's extraordinary mindshare would have trouble overcoming that blatant a mismatch in AMD's favour.

But I expect AMD to continue serving nvidia by releasing only vastly overpriced halo cards a month after nvidia has released theirs in order to ensure that AMD doesn't take any sales from nvidia.

 

[StriderX]

Perhaps it's a nonsense but could there possibly be price fixing going on?

 

[Dirk Diggler]

Has there been an official release date for RDNA3?

 

[Gerard]

Has there been an official release date for RDNA3?

Nay, just annoucements, current rumour is sometime in december for actual availability. Be nice if they could have actual availability on the day of the announcemen, or a couple of days later but that never happens

 

[Jimmy Weirdarms]

Asking out of ignorance here not stirring the pot. If AMD have a card that competes with the 4090, what incentive do they have to price it lower? Knowing how 'loyal' people are to brands, wouldn't they just try and milk the early adopters first.

Well, one reason might be that nvidia are barely holding on to their current pricing and maintain an illusion of high demand by drip-feeding cards into the market. AMD could strike a real blow by significantly undercutting here.

Given that the 7000 series is supposed to be chiplet based, it's possible their yeilds are better and costs per unit much lower than nvidia.

But you're right, they might just slot into the market at price points consistent with team green. It really depends - can they afford to sell the cards a bit cheaper and really go for the market share? I hope so!

 

[Jimmy Weirdarms]

Has there been an official release date for RDNA3?

The announcement is onthe 3rd, we'll see then.

 

[Angilion]

Perhaps it's a nonsense but could there possibly be price fixing going on?

Maybe, but I think a combination of greed and short-termism is a more likely explanation.

Has there been an official release date for RDNA3?

No. AMD will be making some sort of announcement about rnda3 on the 3rd of November, but it might or might not include a release date. There's nothing official about anything, not even what the announcement is about (other than being about rdna3). It's not even known what part of the rdna3 lineup will be announced. Might just be the N31 halo cards. Might be the whole range. Might be full official specs and MSRPs for the whole range. Might be empty marketing fluff for N31 only. Might be an actual release date. Might say what the actual release date is. Which might be in November. Or December. Or January.

I think it's odd and suspicious to have a competitive product and deliberately obscure it completely until your competitor has had plenty of time with an open goal to sell all the extremely high profit halo cards it can sell so all you get is the scraps. Of course, that's assuming AMD have a competitive product. Maybe they don't. Maybe rdna3 is a bit pants. Or maybe AMD is working for nvidia. Maybe there is price fixing going on.

 

[kieran_read]

Maybe, but I think a combination of greed and short-termism is a more likely explanation.



No. AMD will be making some sort of announcement about rnda3 on the 3rd of November, but it might or might not include a release date. There's nothing official about anything, not even what the announcement is about (other than being about rdna3). It's not even known what part of the rdna3 lineup will be announced. Might just be the N31 halo cards. Might be the whole range. Might be full official specs and MSRPs for the whole range. Might be empty marketing fluff for N31 only. Might be an actual release date. Might say what the actual release date is. Which might be in November. Or December. Or January.

I think it's odd and suspicious to have a competitive product and deliberately obscure it completely until your competitor has had plenty of time with an open goal to sell all the extremely high profit halo cards it can sell so all you get is the scraps. Of course, that's assuming AMD have a competitive product. Maybe they don't. Maybe rdna3 is a bit pants. Or maybe AMD is working for nvidia. Maybe there is price fixing going on.

Maybe AMD is just playing some weird 3D chess, can't have a shortage of AMD cards if half the potential customers have already bought Nvidia,

 

[Mr Evil]

I think it's odd and suspicious to have a competitive product and deliberately obscure it completely until your competitor has had plenty of time with an open goal to sell all the extremely high profit halo cards it can sell so all you get is the scraps. Of course, that's assuming AMD have a competitive product. Maybe they don't. Maybe rdna3 is a bit pants. Or maybe AMD is working for nvidia. Maybe there is price fixing going on.

I'm sure AMD have learnt from multiple previous releases where pre-release hints of what their products were going to be like were built up into a supersonic hype-train, only to have reality throw some leaves on the line. Keeping everything hush-hush seems like a safe strategy to me, avoiding the actual products looking bad relative to impossible expectations.

And it's not like nVidia are going to sell vast numbers of £2k cards over the next week.

 

[varkanoid]

Interesting with the XTX on the end harking back to the ATI 1900XTX

 

[Gerard]

Interesting with the XTX on the end harking back to the ATI 1900XTX

xt and xtx have been interal codenames for AMD\Ati cards for years, there was an x800xt an x800xt-PE (platinum edition) as well. It only seems to occasionally show up on cards in stores though.

 

[EastCoastHandle]

AMD used both xtx and xtxh variants of the 6900xt. With the 6900xtxh being the best of the best. Very little reviews were had with xtxh variants. Only xt's. Thus why some think that the 6900 is slow, LOL.

 

[KompuKare]

The delays could be drivers, especially getting the chiplet design working. Although while once they go for multiple chiplets (possibly with RDNA4) the will have major driver work, but for RDNA3 having the IO chips separate might have placed such a huge burden on the driver team.

Another possible reason for any delay could be packaging. While TSMC have been talking a lot about their new packaging "ways", there might be bottlenecks there. Those 3D stacked "XTX" top parts might be competing with capacity with Genoa-X. Which should a lot more profitable. Although looking at Intel's latest Q3 results, data centre is no guarantee of profit - while Intel's design is pretty poor servers the fact that they are effectively giving away Xeon (data centre results were pretty close to $0 profit). Hard to say, but even with AMD's margin obsession, demonstrating to the stockmarket that they have a high-end GPU should be worth something.

Of course, there's always the possibility that the silence is because RDNA3 is uncompetitive - going chiplet does carry significant risks. At least this time they didn't put all eggs into one basket like they did with HBM2 and Vega as Navi33 is monolith.

 

[Gerard]

The delays could be drivers, especially getting the chiplet design working. Although while once they go for multiple chiplets (possibly with RDNA4) the will have major driver work, but for RDNA3 having the IO chips separate might have placed such a huge burden on the driver team.

Another possible reason for any delay could be packaging. While TSMC have been talking a lot about their new packaging "ways", there might be bottlenecks there. Those 3D stacked "XTX" top parts might be competing with capacity with Genoa-X. Which should a lot more profitable. Although looking at Intel's latest Q3 results, data centre is no guarantee of profit - while Intel's design is pretty poor servers the fact that they are effectively giving away Xeon (data centre results were pretty close to $0 profit). Hard to say, but even with AMD's margin obsession, demonstrating to the stockmarket that they have a high-end GPU should be worth something.

Of course, there's always the possibility that the silence is because RDNA3 is uncompetitive - going chiplet does carry significant risks. At least this time they didn't put all eggs into one basket like they did with HBM2 and Vega as Navi33 is monolith.

Who says there's any delay at all? Theyre launching when they want to launch it from what i can see.

 

[gpuerrilla]

If it's competitive it won't be cheaper by much, maybe £50 or so.

'Competitive' to some translates to ray tracing and DLSS. As they do not have these exact features its a faux pas.

 

[gpuerrilla]

There's a tiny vague hope that AMD will go for market share and (arguably more important) mindshare. They could. They're not very limited in supply for rdna3 and cards using it and they don't have large amounts of unsold rdna2 product. So they could go for increasing their market share and increasing their reputation and increasing their media coverage. That would be a potential way to increase profit, especially over a longer period of time. It's also extremely likely that AMD's production costs are significantly lower than nvidia's due to the quite different designs of the GPUs. So AMD probably could significantly undercut nvidia on price while maintaining high profit margins. Another possible approach would be to release a full range of rdna3 cards, including the far larger market for mainstream graphics cards. AMD doesn't have loads of rdna2 kit that they can't sell, so AMD's mainstream rdna3 cards would currently be competing against nvidia's 3000 series, not their own 6000 series. The biggest effect might not be a 7900XT that competes with a 4090 and sells for a lower price. It might be a 7700XT that outperforms a 3070 and sells for a lower price. If you had a choice between a 3070 at £600 or a 7700XT that outperforms a 3070 in every way, has double the amount of VRAM, uses less power, runs cooler and costs £500, which would you buy? Even nvidia's extraordinary mindshare would have trouble overcoming that blatant a mismatch in AMD's favour.

Post of the thread. Would be great if they somewhat executed this.

 

[Calin Banc]

Asking out of ignorance here not stirring the pot. If AMD have a card that competes with the 4090, what incentive do they have to price it lower? Knowing how 'loyal' people are to brands, wouldn't they just try and milk the early adopters first.

I read a lot of hopium that they are about to release a 4090 and charge hundreds less, seems unlikely is all.

Since their Ryzen 7xxx adventure is not going that good, maybe they'll try to compensate with their GPUs

There's a tiny vague hope that AMD will go for market share and (arguably more important) mindshare. They could. They're not very limited in supply for rdna3 and cards using it and they don't have large amounts of unsold rdna2 product. So they could go for increasing their market share and increasing their reputation and increasing their media coverage. That would be a potential way to increase profit, especially over a longer period of time. It's also extremely likely that AMD's production costs are significantly lower than nvidia's due to the quite different designs of the GPUs. So AMD probably could significantly undercut nvidia on price while maintaining high profit margins. Another possible approach would be to release a full range of rdna3 cards, including the far larger market for mainstream graphics cards. AMD doesn't have loads of rdna2 kit that they can't sell, so AMD's mainstream rdna3 cards would currently be competing against nvidia's 3000 series, not their own 6000 series. The biggest effect might not be a 7900XT that competes with a 4090 and sells for a lower price. It might be a 7700XT that outperforms a 3070 and sells for a lower price. If you had a choice between a 3070 at £600 or a 7700XT that outperforms a 3070 in every way, has double the amount of VRAM, uses less power, runs cooler and costs £500, which would you buy? Even nvidia's extraordinary mindshare would have trouble overcoming that blatant a mismatch in AMD's favour.

But I expect AMD to continue serving nvidia by releasing only vastly overpriced halo cards a month after nvidia has released theirs in order to ensure that AMD doesn't take any sales from nvidia.

Nothing stopping nVIDIA to drop their prices on the 3070 in a situation like that, so it will end up like what's cheaper to build: 3070 on an old (most likely significantly cheaper process), or 7700xt on a brand new one?

 

[uscool]

It will better if it beats the 4070 the one they tried to badge as 4080 12gb ? which Nvidia probably price at £600-£700

 

[gpuerrilla]

Nothing stopping nVIDIA to drop their prices on the 3070 in a situation like that, so it will end up like what's cheaper to build: 3070 on an old (most likely significantly cheaper process), or 7700xt on a brand new one?

At the moment the 6900 is doing the same shuffling to offer decent performance. For some reason people think the 3070 is a great card yet the 6700 is its pauper cousin. They are quite close, AMD being far cheaper already. It wont be available for a while by the looks of it (7700XT).

 

[Grim5]

Perhaps it's a nonsense but could there possibly be price fixing going on?

Yes but not the illegal type.

What's illegal is when you talk to your competitor and directly set a price.

Legal price fixing happens when an industry has little competition and both companies without even talking to each other realise that it's in their long term financial interest not to have prices that are much different from each other - this is how petrol companies work too