AMD to Launch RDNA 3 on November 3

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AMD jumps in front just as Nvidia gets on stage to launch the 40-series.

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(Image credit: PowerColor)

Nvidia is probably launching some new GeForce RTX cards during a GTC presentation today, but AMD would rather you look to the future. AMD has announced that it will launch RDNA 3 on November 3. It's set to be a big showdown to claim honors among the best graphics cards this fall.

Radeon senior vice president and general manager Scott Herkelman shared the news in a tweet. (Embedded below. Click "See more" to view the full tweet.)

This is the second time this week AMD has put RDNA 3 into the news cycle. Yesterday, AMD published a blog post about performance-per-watt gains and efficiency in Radeon GPUs based on RDNA technology.

Rumors suggest that RNDA 3 will offer up to 96 compute units with 12,288 shaders and up to 50% more performance per watt than previous generations. It's moving to a GPU chiplet architecture as well, which could revolutionize GPUs just as the company's chiplet-based Ryzen lineup has completely changed the CPU landscape. Check our everything we know about the Radeon RX 7000 series and RDNA 3 GPUs for additional details.

We're also expecting that the ray tracing hardware will get a serious improvement, including dedicated BVH hardware, which both Intel and Nvidia offer. The move to chiplets would be a move away from the way GPUs are currently made (from a single piece of silicon), which allows for lower cost paired with a more scalable architecture. It also allows AMD to race out to new, smaller process nodes before other companies.

We'll hopefully find out the answer to that — and a lot more — on November 3. The top spots on our GPU benchmarks hierarchy are up for grabs.

Andrew E. Freedman

Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Threads @FreedmanAE and Mastodon @FreedmanAE.mastodon.social.

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5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • RichardtST
    I would LOVE for AMD to build a successful video card just to take some wind out of NVIDIA's 50% profit margin.... Do the new cards actually run Minecraft? I heard rumor that they fixed/upgraded the OpenGL support? Does Windows actually recognize the card from a clean install boot? I tried Radeon once and was massively disappointed. How can I know they are worth trying again?
    Reply
  • TCA_ChinChin
    RichardtST said:
    I would LOVE for AMD to build a successful video card just to take some wind out of NVIDIA's 50% profit margin.... Do the new cards actually run Minecraft? I heard rumor that they fixed/upgraded the OpenGL support? Does Windows actually recognize the card from a clean install boot? I tried Radeon once and was massively disappointed. How can I know they are worth trying again?
    When was your last experience? AMD GPUs have gotten a lot better over the years. And I'm pretty sure they've always been able to run Minecraft and support OpenGL.
    Reply
  • mamasan2000
    RichardtST said:
    I would LOVE for AMD to build a successful video card just to take some wind out of NVIDIA's 50% profit margin.... Do the new cards actually run Minecraft? I heard rumor that they fixed/upgraded the OpenGL support? Does Windows actually recognize the card from a clean install boot? I tried Radeon once and was massively disappointed. How can I know they are worth trying again?

    Are you referring to the massive FPS boost in old OpenGL games? AMD should have released those drivers months back.
    The other issues, I don't know what you refer to. Why wouldn't AMD cards work? They worked before they were AMD, back in the ATI days.
    Windows installing drivers for GPU on first install, you really want to avoid that. Most people unplug their ethernet-cable so it wont happen. Those drivers are old. Get fresh drivers, install manually. Then plug in ethernet. Download to a USB-stick for example.
    Reply
  • mitch074
    mamasan2000 said:
    Are you referring to the massive FPS boost in old OpenGL games? AMD should have released those drivers months back.
    The other issues, I don't know what you refer to. Why wouldn't AMD cards work? They worked before they were AMD, back in the ATI days.
    Windows installing drivers for GPU on first install, you really want to avoid that. Most people unplug their ethernet-cable so it wont happen. Those drivers are old. Get fresh drivers, install manually. Then plug in ethernet. Download to a USB-stick for example.
    Back when Doom 2016 came out I had a brand new Radeon RX 480 8Gb; Nvidia was touring all press events with their Geforce 980Ti as the only card that could run Doom in 4K. 6 months later, the first Vulkan-compatible drivers came out, and id Software issued a patch for Doom that enabled Vulkan as an usable API and activated async compute in some antialiasing modes on supported hardware. Some tests showed a 45% performance increase on some AMD models.

    My FPS went directly from 38-44 fps to 60-70+.

    Nvidia dropped Doom from their portfolio of games they put forward : their GPUs plain didn't support async compute and Vulkan brought pretty much no performance improvement over their (excellent) OpenGL and DX11 drivers.

    In 2017, id Software removed the DRM from Doom; it became a matter of "installing the latest version of Wine" => "install Steam" => "install Doom" => game on! The game had shipped with a cracked binary, making the game playable on Linux. When id Software straight out removed the DRM, Doom became the main benchmark for open source Vulkan driver development; it took a few months for it to go from "I get a GUI on black background then it crashes" to "damn, that game is fast and fun!". Performance was a bit behind the official AMD driver at first, but soon caught up.

    That didn't stop development of the OpenGL driver : around the release of Doom Eternal, I pulled out my copy of Doom 2016 and gave it a whirl, again on my trusty old RX480. Vulkan was as smooth as ever and then, just for kicks, I switched to OpenGL. FPS was almost as high as under Vulkan.

    I tried other OpenGL games : Deus Ex, Tomb Raider 2013, Borderlands 2, Mad Max (the only other game I owned that supported both APIs), Wolfenstein the New Order... All had gotten quite a boost.

    I read somewhere that AMD engineers were looking at what was done on the open source driver to apply it to their crusty old OpenGL (and DX9, and DX11) driver... Looks like they landed it in July and August of 2022. Performance mainly came from a re-written resource allocator, if I'm not mistaken. I also tried the old Unigine demos on an AMD APU : I did notice a 5-15 % performance improvement in DX11.
    Reply
  • RichardtST
    Thanks for all the replies.... Last I tried to use a board for a windows install was about 4 years ago. Maybe that has been fixed. I don't know. Last I tried to run java/lwjgl/opengl was just a month ago. That has not been fixed. I have to make the secondary 3060 built into my AMD laptop the primary card, and then opengl works properly and runs my games. (It has built-in AMD graphics) Minecraft has never worked on AMD cards since back when it first started. It was/is common knowledge that if you intended to ever run minecraft, you simply did not buy AMD graphics. If it ran at all, you got single-digit fps if you were lucky. This still holds true today.

    AMD needs to revamp (fire them all and walk them out the door) their software processes and priorities. Awful software has been and still is their downfall.

    Kind of like Intel with Arc. Intel cannot write software. Never has. Never will. They are a hardware company.

    Not to give the wrong impression here... I am totally an AMD CPU fan. I've got two at home and half a dozen here at the office. It's just their GPUs.... they need help.
    Reply