AMD fans have been waiting for a high-resolution graphics card for several years: with the launch of the “Polaris” GCNs since AMD did not introduce any card to compete in that product list, Vega passed with more embarrassment, Radeon VII like its predecessor and less visible, and with RDNA that they did not want to compete at the top.
That’s why rumors of a GPU competing against the high end of NVIDIA have been around for a while because AMD has almost never been on the market where NVIDIA has since introduced the GTX 1080 direct competition from AMD.
Rumors were confirmed when Lisa Su, president of AMD, confirmed the existence of Big Navi during the last CES, which will be one of two GPUs under the RDNA 2 architecture that we know will be unveiled on October 28, in a dedicated presentation to RDNA 2.
The RX 6900 XT will be ‘big’: AMD’s biggest GPU to date
The first picture we think of has been that of a GPU upgrading RX 6900 XT, which should be at the top of the graphics card in the next generation of AMD graphics.
And if the rumors are confirmed, we will be facing the second largest GPU AMD has introduced to the market so far, skipped only by AMD Fiji which was approximately 600 mm in size2 in total, because it is guaranteed that the GPU of the RX 6900 XT (Navi 21) will have a size of 18.65 mm x 29 mm
This makes it the largest AMD GPU based on memory other than HBM to date, as we know it will have 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM type memory, unlike its rival NVIDIA that comes with GDDR6X.
What causes the huge size of the RX 6900 XT GPU?
To date the largest AMD GPU under RDNA architecture is the one that equips the RX 5700 and RX 5600 distances in all its variants. It’s a chip 242 mm2
But that figure doesn’t tell us much about size reasons and we should keep in mind that RDNA 2 has a variety of new features in terms of RDNA, some of which we don’t know yet, but things like hardware provided to calculate Ray Tracing Road in the same style as NVIDIA, Variable Rate Shading support and speed of high clock is among the new things that have been confirmed.
Not to mention the infamous Infinity Cache, a modern 128MB cache embedded on the chip. In any case, we can’t wait to see AMD’s return to the high end, as the closest competition remains good for us users.