AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 63Wave cycles here. If you want an insightful yet
understandable explanation of the major
RDNA architecture changes and have 23
minutes to spare, I highly recommend
watching the Gamers Nexus interview with
technology analyst David Kanter at
go.pcworld.com/dav. It’s great.
AMD says that between the RDNA
tweaks and the shift to the 7nm
manufacturing process, its new cards are
much more powerful and power-efficient
than before—claims that
bear fruit in our testing.
(Spoiler alert: Navi is even
more power-efficient than
Nvidia’s Turing
architecture, a
monumental reversal of
the norm with GCN.)
The company’s
architecture deep-dive for
reporters touted some
impressive numbers for
Navi: 25 percent more
performance per clock
versus Vega, and a
whopping 50-percent
performance increase
overall at the same
power levels.
Impressive. Those
performance-per-clock
improvements also
make the TFLOPS
comparisons in the chart misleading, as these
Navi GPUs do more with each teraflop.
Speaking of clocks, the Radeon RX 5700
and 5700 XT hit much, much higher clock
speeds than AMD’s previous cards,
surpassing Vega’s best by hundreds of
megahertz. No matter how you measure it,
that’s a good thing. AMD also introduced
new clock speed terminology to more clearly
express estimated performance levels.
The company’s providing three clock