As she grapples with NVIDIA in the fiercely competitive Graphic cardhere is a rumor that AMD would have done well without.
Recently released, AMD’s Radeon RX 7900XT and RX 7900XTX weren’t the revolution some had hoped for, but they did show that there is room to challenge NVIDIA’s dominance. The rumor of a hardware bug shouldn’t spoil it all.
For a handful of stepping
While the Radeon RX card reviews were released on December 12th and the commercialization came the next day, a certain @davidbepo noticed a lag in stepping between GPU-Z and video BIOS.
To put it simply, the stepping is an identifier of the version of the hardware used, here of the GPU used on the graphics cards: while GPU-Z speaks of C8, it is question of A0 in the VBIOS. The discrepancy challenges, but difficult to conclude anything.
However, in the process, it was @Kepler_L2 who, while digging into the question, noticed that the stepping A0 would be affected by a material problem, the effects of which are still unknown. One thing seems certain in any case, the prefetch of shader is indeed disabled in the Linux drivers.
One shader nonfunctional ?
For some, notably our colleagues from WCCFTech, it is a hardware bug that would affect three AMD components, the Navi 31, Navi 33 and the Phoenix APU. Components that can be found – the first in particular – in the brand’s latest graphics cards.
At this time, AMD has not commented, and in reality it is difficult to know the exact scope of the “discovery”. Still, it is amazing to see a stepping A0 – which marks the first version – on an everyday consumer product and that we would like to have the end of the story.
While AMD had mentioned an energy efficiency of RDNA 3 54% higher than that of RDNA 2 – we are far from it – and that it had insisted on the progress offered in ray tracing by the VOPD instructions – they only bring a measly +4% – one wonders if some of these “problems” are not related to this bug.
Pending clarifications from AMD, we are left to ask ourselves questions. Perhaps answers will come with the release of the next batches of Radeon RX 7900? Anyway, to be continued…
Source : WCCFTech
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