AMD Reveals More Details Around The Radeon RX 7900 Series / RDNA3

The RDNA3 power efficiency should be just as an interesting as the raw performance gains over RDNA2, assuming all of the Linux driver knobs are in order for ensuring optimal performance-per-Watt to match Windows.

AMD talking up RDNA3's compute and machine learning capabilities is terrific. This also provides hope that they will be providing ROCm support for RDNA3 sooner rather than later, unlike the delays seen for RDNA and RDNA2 consumer GPUs with belated ROCm Linux compatibility.

The ray-tracing capabilities are vastly improved over RDNA2. This will be another interesting area for Linux. The RADV Mesa Vulkan driver has been working on RDNA3/GFX11 support but it's not clear yet how good that (unofficial) support will be for launch day. There is also the open-source AMDVLK driver with GPURT that will likely see launch-day support while with the packaged Radeon Software for Linux driver is likely where there will be the best RDNA3 Vulkan ray-tracing support initially. RADV ray-tracing in general has gotten into much better shape recently and then with GPURT there is finally the open-source AMDVLK support.

Chiplets proved to be highly successful for Ryzen and EPYC processors while RDNA3 is AMD's first time taking it into the GPU world.

For the new Wave Matrix Multiply Accumulate (WMMA) support with RDNA3, we've already seen AMD work on the new rocWMMA library as part of their ROCm work and then also the matrix accelerator changes on the LLVM compiler side.

The mature ray-tracing support on the NVIDIA side has been one of its big advantages for gamers while with RDNA3, AMD has much improved its ray-tracing hardware.