AMD accused of treating consumers as 'guinea pigs' by shipping unfinished RX 7900 GPUs

Date:
Fri, 16 Dec 2022 13:01:04 +0000

Description:
Some tech heads lucky enough to get their hands on the GPU are reporting broken code and strange clock speed variance.

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Well, maybe it was all too good to be true. We were seriously impressed with the Radeon RX 7900 XTX , AMDs new flagship GPU, when we reviewed it, but new reports are suggesting that all is not well with the newly-launched graphics card .

The first sign that something was amiss came from Twitter user @uzzi38 , who noted that power issues seemed to be causing weird variance in the RX 7900 XTXs clock speeds depending on the program being used. As discussed in the Twitter thread below @uzzi38s post, the cards operating frequency varied from 1,594MHz to 2,994MHz across a variety of tests conducted by TechPowerUp , while the voltage remained below 1V for almost the entire process. Depending on the title the 7900XTX can run anywhere from below 2.4GHz to just over 2.9GHz, all the while sitting around or below 1V. That's a massive variance.I don't think I've ever seen such a massive red flag before when it comes to missing power targets. pic.twitter.com/AEGWc424kk December 12, 2022 See more

These tests were run at the cards default settings, and its obviously a massive variance. A few days later, Dutch YouTuber and GPU reviewer @NadaOverbeeke found that the cards clock speeds would leap up seemingly at random in certain games, resulting in a corresponding jump in performance. Modern Warfare 2 showed a framerate variation of around 20% in separate tests on the same GPU without any settings being adjusted. Some really odd behavior with the ASUS TUF 7900 XT. It'll run 2400 MHz in one game, then 2900 MHz in the next. All stock settings, with similar power draw. December 14, 2022 See more

Unfortunately for AMD, it gets worse. Around the same time as Nadalinas findings, Twitter user @Kepler_L2 located a non-functional shader prefetch in the Navi 31 A0 silicon that powers the RX 7900 XTX. Kepler believes this indicates that AMD chose to release unfinished silicon; A0 in this context refers to revision 1, or the first version of the silicon to go into production. This means that future models of the Navi 31 GPUs may not feature the same non-working prefetch. Analysis: AMDs rush to launch RDNA 3 might
cost it the moral high ground against Nvidia

Anyone who's been paying attention will know that weve been fairly cold on Nvidia lately: between melting power adaptors on the RTX 4090 and the messy unlaunch of the RTX 4080 12GB (not to mention the actual RTX 4080 s sub-par performance for the $1,199 asking price), Team Green hasnt been doing a lot
to foster goodwill among consumers.

Enter AMD, with some very competitively priced new GPUs the RX 7900 XTX at $999 and the slightly less powerful XT variant at $899. Initial showings were strong, with the XTX card beating the RTX 4080 in many areas despite costing $200 less. Given earlier statements from Nvidia about how GPUs would continue to increase in price, while AMD and Intel insisted that theyd be battling against such a rise, we were sitting firmly in the red corner.

But these new problems with the RX 7900 XTX could cause AMD to lose some of the goodwill its managed to accumulate over the past few months. Releasing unfinished silicon is a bad look for any big tech company; the shader
prefetch problem isnt an issue that can be quickly fixed with a driver update (although AMD will eventually be able to improve the performance), and releasing newer physical revisions of the GPU wont help anyone who's already purchased one.

As to why AMD might have released unfinished silicon, thats anybodys guess. The most reasonable line of speculation is that AMD had a pre-Christmas
launch window that it couldnt afford to miss. AMD will, of course, continue
to improve the RX 7900 XTXs performance via driver updates, with ray-tracing performance expected to get a boost in the coming months as AMD works out the kinks.

We've reached out to AMD for a statement regarding these reports, and will update this article if we get a response.



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/amd-accused-of-treating-consumers-as-guinea-pig s-by-shipping-unfinished-rx-7900-gpus


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