The entire GPU market is really out of whack right now, it’s kinda unbelievable — between a mountain of work to get the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 reviews up — while keeping up with all of the rumors from both sides is exhausting for everyone.
Well, now we have yet another Big Navi rumor that seems to paint the card in a not-so-great light. It seems that some pieces of the Big Navi puzzle are coming together with specs on the Navi 21-based Big Navi aka Sienna Cichlid.
Navi 21 will reportedly pack up to 80 compute units (CUs) where we should see 5120 stream processors, with a Navi 21A variant at 2050MHz while there will also reportedly be a Navi 21B at up to 2200MHz. The higher-end Navi 21B at 2200MHz would result in shader performance of around 22.5 TFLOPs — which means it’ll lose in a big way against NVIDIA’s new GeForce RTX 3080 which has 29.8 TLFOPs.
We should note that TFLOPs performance won’t win the battles, and AMD will have many aces up its sleeve when it comes to RDNA 2. AMD is also making its new Radeon RX 6000 series on the 7nm node at TSMC, versus NVIDIA’s new GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs being made on Samsung 8nm.
We should expect the Navi 21B variant to probably try get close to the RTX 3080 (and maybe closer to RTX 3070), while the Navi 21A might hit the RTX 3060 Ti or RTX 3070 territory.
I think no matter what NVIDIA will remain on top through its GeForce RTX 3090, which is kinda the reason behind the RTX 3090 in the first place. A card 10-15% faster than the RTX 3080 with 24GB of VRAM so it has the ultimate card, with the most amount of VRAM.
Big Navi should ship in 8GB, 12GB and 16GB variants
