AMD Navi 14 3 GB variant pops up on Compubench; positions itself between the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and GeForce GTX 1650

It has been a few years since AMD released a 3 GB Desktop GPU, with the last being the Radeon R9 280 and R9 280X in March 2014 and August 2013 respectively. However, a recent Compubench listing suggests that the company has another planned. The benchmark lists the GPU as the AMD 7340:CF, which appears to be part of the same family as the AMD 7341:00 and AMD 7340:C1 on which we recently reported.

The benchmark identifies the AMD 7340:CF as a GFX1012, meaning that it is another Navi 14 GPU, AMD's potentially more budget-friendly RDNA chips. Indeed, the AMD 7340:CF has 24 compute units (CU) and a 1.9 GHz boost clock just like the other Navi 14 GPUs that have appeared on Compubench. However, it appears to have 3 GB of VRAM, with the other Navi 14 GPUs reporting 4 GB or 8 GB. Moreover, it has smaller buffer and memory allocation sizes, making it less likely that the AMD 7340:CF is a 4 GB SKU in disguise.

Additionally, the AMD 7340:CF performs anywhere between parity and 48% worse than the AMD 7340:C1, the 4 GB SKU that appeared on Compubench a few weeks ago. Comparing the AMD 7340:CF with NVIDIA GPUs reveals that it places between the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and GeForce GTX 1650. As always, it would be wise not to draw conclusions from one benchmark. Furthermore, we suspect the AMD 7340:CF to be an engineering sample, which often are only indicative of how a retail part will perform, and not a true reflection thereof.

In short, it looks like AMD is gunning for NVIDIA's full GeForce GTX 16xx stack with Navi 14. We expect Navi 14 to be based on a 7 nm FinFET process just as the RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT are, with AMD possibly selling the GPU as the RX 5500 or RX 5600.