AMD Radeon Navi 14 GPU Benchmark Leak Suggests Entry-Level Graphics Cards Are Coming
We are all looking ahead to when AMD launches a full-tilt version of Navi for the high-end market with ray tracing support, but in the more immediate future, the company may be readying new 7-nanometer GPUs for the entry-level sector. That is the implication of recently leaked benchmarks for a set of supposed Navi 14 GPUs, anyway.
Codenames can get confusing, so before we go any further, let's have a look at what's out there currently:
- Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary: Navi 10 XTX
- Radeon RX 5700 XT: Navi 10 XT
- Radeon RX 5700: Navi 10
In short, the Radeon RX 5700 series is based on Navi 10, with the XTX and XT variants both featuring 2,560 shaders and 160 TMUs, and the XL version having 2,304 shaders and 144 TMUs. Sometime next year (presumably), AMD will launch a series Navi 20 GPUs for the high-end market, to both replace the Radeon VII (based on Vega), and for Sony's PlayStation 5 and Microsoft's Project Scarlett consoles.
Now let's circle back to Navi 14. Twitter user Komachi spotted the entries on CompuBench. At the top of the stack is one that is labeled AMD 7341:00 (device ID), which denotes a Radeon RX graphics card with 8GB of memory. Under that is the AMD 7340:C1 for a Radeon RX graphics card with 4GB of memory, and finally there is the AMD 7340:CF for a Radeon RX graphics card with 3GB of memory.
These GPUs sport 24 CUs (1,536 stream processors), and are codenamed GFX1012, which is the internal name for Navi 14, according to WCCFTech.
Based on the above benchmarks, Navi 14 (as represented on these particularly models) performs a bit better than AMD's Radeon RX 570, which is powered by a Polaris 20 GPU. AMD has tapped Polaris for a long time now, for its entry-level and mid-range offerings (below the Radeon RX 5700 series).
A changing of the guard might finally be coming. AMD has long said it is going all-in with its 7nm technology, and replacing Polaris with an entry-level Navi 14 GPU would fit into that strategy. The potentially tricky part would be the price points—Polaris solutions have been attractive because of the bang-for-buck they offered.
In any event, this will be something to keep an eye on. It's possibly that by the end of the year, AMD will have Navi cards going up against NVIDIA's lower end Turing products (GeForce GTX 1650, namely), competing in both price and performance.
