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There’s a new set of slides being passed around that supposedly showcase AMD’s upcoming Radeon 6900 XT. They’re completely fake. Here’s how you can tell:
In the first slide, the branding has been updated at the upper right, but the branding on the actual GPU hasn’t been. Also, that’s a Radeon 5700 cooler with a Vega water-cooler next to it, and there’s a clear flaw in the image where the radiator attaches to the card.
The specs themselves are pretty reasonable. I’m not saying how accurate I think they are, but the specs are the only part of the slide that isn’t instantly fake. At the very least, I’d have to get out a calculator and run some numbers first.
The fact that there’s a price on the card is another way you know this slide is fake. Price is always the last thing a company decides on.
This slide made me laugh out loud when I saw it. Whoever created this work of art has never, ever, talked to anyone in marketing.
Marketing, my friends, is all about optimism. You might note, for example, that when AMD declared Ryzen would have an IPC 1.4x higher than Excavator, they did not do so with a giant slide labeled NO MORE BULLDOZENT
If AMD was ever going to whip out the “No More Compromises” play, you’d think they’d do it here.
There’s no way in hell AMD would ever advertise RDNA2 in a manner that implied RDNA or any previous GPU was “compromised.” AMD is still shipping Vega silicon in its APUs and as part of its compute business.
AMD is unlikely to call its ray tracing implementation “RXRT,” and the estimated performance impact of enabling the feature is hilarious, to put it lightly.
I was not particularly thrilled with Turing when it came out and I expect both Ampere and RDNA2 to offer superior performance in ray tracing workloads, but there’s no chance whatsoever that AMD takes a 5-9 percent penalty for enabling ray-tracing effects. If real-time ray tracing only carried a 5-10 percent performance penalty relative to rasterization, we’d have integrated RTRT a long time ago.
The typical performance hit for using ray tracing is more along the lines of 50-80 percent. Because we only have one generation of hardware from one company, we don’t know how much that number can be improved — but it beggars belief to think AMD has cut it by nearly an order of magnitude. It’s not even clear which RTX games will support RDNA2 ray tracing out of the gate.
The “Ultimate 4K Gaming Experience” is spot-on for a marketing slide, but AMD doesn’t give you game detail settings in the bars of its slides, and they don’t label up the y-axis to the point that you have to twist your neck like an owl in order to read it.
Also, good to see top-notch performance in Red Dead Redemption, a game that never received a PC release. Never heard of “Witcher 3,” either, since the actual name of the series is “The Witcher.”
This is what it looks like when people with more aspiration than Photoshop try to troll AMD fans. There’s a consistent design language to AMD’s slide decks and a consistent way that companies communicate about their products. These slides fail at both.
I declare this GPU a new and different product under the sun. Presenting the AMD Radeaint 6900 XT, launching September 2020.
Feature image is the AMD Radeon 5700 XT.
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