AMD’s Navi 14-based graphics cards look like they’re going to be coming in at least two flavours, with a potential 8GB Radeon RX 5600 XT at the top of the mainstream AMD list in the pipe for release this year. There might even be some sort of 4GB RX 5500 XT and even a Radeon RX 5500 with 3GB. Yeah. 3GB of VRAM. In 2019.
The somewhat bizarre specs have come from three different listings in the CompuBench benchmarking database. These are likely based on tests of engineering samples of the upcoming AMD Navi 14 GPUs, and come with two different PCI IDs on the same GPU ID which has been all but confirmed as the mainstream Navi GPU.
As these are early benchmarks of engineering samples that means the specs are in no way definitive or finalised. That means we can probably take the video memory layout with a dose of sodium, but AMD does have a history of releasing multiple SKUs of GPUs, with very different levels of memory for different territories. Though even China’s gaming cafe culture might baulk at a paltry 3GB of VRAM.
The previous Navi 14 benchmarks have been revealed before, and show a GPU with the PCI ID of AMD 7341 and GPU ID of gfx1012. With its 8GB of memory and maximum of 24 compute units, and therefore 1,536 RDNA cores, and a maximum clock speed of 1,900MHz. Aside from the video memory capacity the specs are identical for the AMD 7340 GPU with 4GB VRAM, but the references to max compute units and max clock frequency could just refer to the Navi 14 GPU itself, and might not reference graphics cards built on cut-down versions of the same graphics silicon.
The 3GB version of the AMD 7340 GPU, however, is new. It was highlighted by serial tweeter Komachi in one of their regular database trawls and later tweets suggests a certain incredulity in a new Radeon graphics card launching with the Navi architecture with just 3GB of memory.
[CompuBench] Compute Performance of AMD 7340:CF https://t.co/P8mjdkvlQ4
>GFX1012 = Navi 14.
>CL_DEVICE_MAX_COMPUTE_UNITS = 12 (24) CU.
>CL_DEVICE_GLOBAL_MEM_SIZE = 3204448256.— 比屋定さんの戯れ言@Komachi (@KOMACHI_ENSAKA) August 27, 2019
For a sub-$100 GPU maybe that’s enough, certainly the 3GB version of Nvidia’s GTX 1060 still delivered a pretty decent level of 1080p gaming performance. But if you’re looking for any modicum of future-proofing from a new graphics card purchase I’d suggest that’s not quite enough for modern games going forward.
Hopefully we’ll be able to check the veracity of these early Navi 14 leaks soon, as the regularity with which they’re popping up suggests it won’t be long before they adorn our test bench. Once we’re getting completely untrustworthy Final Fantasy XV and Ashes of the Singularity benchmark leaks we’ll know we’re but a few months off from release…
Then we’ve also got some Navi 12 GPUs to follow for desert, and they could even include some of the promised ‘Big Navi’ chips too.
Is 3GB enough for a graphics card in 2019? Join the conversation on this article’s Facebook and Twitter threads.