Rumor | AMD 'Navi' RX 3080 XT could give the NVIDIA RTX 2070 some serious competition, early Navi samples suffer from power efficiency issues

We reported earlier on the possible launch of AMD's new 7 nm Navi-based GPUs at E3 2019. Now, we are getting to know some interesting tidbits about the Radeon RX 3080 XT courtesy of AdoredTV. As always, these are pre-launch rumors so do remember to keep a cup of salt beside while reading this.

Radeon RX 3080 XT to offer RTX 2070 performance for US$330!

The AMD Radeon RX 3080 XT based on the Navi10 core is said to feature 56 Compute Units, 8 GB GDDR6 memory, and 190 W TDP with a performance equivalent to that of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070. AdoredTV expects the RX 3080 XT expected to retail for US$330, which if true, could be real value for money considering that the RTX 2070 has an MSRP of US$599.

Efficiency issues galore in early Navi samples

Our Radeon VII (Vega20) review showed that the move 7 nm did not bring in the anticipated improvements in power draws although, the GPU itself was a worthwhile upgrade from the Vega 64. We've recently seen driver code that indicated Navi would still be based on GCN (the last GCN chip in all probability) implying that radical improvements in power and efficiency cannot be expected than what is already being seen with Vega20.

AdoredTV echoes a similar observation that early Navi samples are not able to even hit Vega20 clocks and even if they do, they are facing major thermal and power consumption issues. Therefore, in order to mitigate these issues, AMD would have to reduce clocks lower than what the Radeon VII offers, at least in its high-end Navi20 SKUs.

Again, we would like to state that there is no way to trace and verify this information at this point so just treat it as rumor for now. All is not lost though, as Navi is expected to bring features such as ray tracing, variable rate shading, and an improved SMU framework similar to Ryzen CPUs.