That means the 50% more power per watt

Bit by bit, AMD is fighting its main competitor Nvidia – which of course doesn't sleep either and could in turn bring new, faster graphics cards to the market at the end of 2020.

AMD is finally delivering more details on its new RDNA2 architecture, including performance information. Compared to the current navigation maps with RDNA (1) chips (Radeon RX 5000) fifty percent more power per watt be inside.

AMD announced the information at the Financial Analyst Days 2020. Details on the basis of new graphics cards can be found above all in the publicly viewable "Driving GPU Leadership" presentation.

Raytracing support has also been reaffirmed, with AMD common architecture for PCs and consoles emphasizes: Sony's PlayStation 5 and Microsoft's Xbox Series X are also likely to use RDNA2.

What does performance per watt mean?

For example, while pure performance data only consist of fps numbers in games, they are put in relation to the energy required for the performance per watt.

So if, for example, two graphics cards achieve the same fps in a game, but the power consumption of one of the two graphics cards is significantly lower, then this is not clearly in terms of performance, but in terms of performance per watt.

The other way around, it is also possible that two GPUs have a comparable power consumption, but one delivers clearly more fps than the other.

How can you estimate the 50 percent more?

To answer this question, a look at graphics cards that are already available helps. AMD states that the switch from the older GCN architecture (most recently used for the RX Vega GPUs) to the first RDNA generation (RX 5000) also meant an increase of 50 percent power per watt.

The comparison between the RX 5700 XT and its predecessor RX Vega 64 helps to classify AMD's current performance information on RDNA2.

In view of our own experience in the current graphics card test system, this is quite realistic: When comparing the RX 5700 XT (RDNA) with the RX Vega 64 (GCN), the 5700 XT is about 40 to 60 percent better in terms of performance per watt .

This is mainly due to its significantly lower power consumption thanks to 7nm production, as these measurement results * from our test system in Anno 1800 illustrate.

* Anno 1800, very high details, 2560×1440. Power consumption applies to the entire test system.

This is to be expected from Big Navi

Since the RDNA2 also uses 7nm production, which is already used in the RX 5700 XT – even if in an optimized form – it cannot be assumed that the power consumption will decrease as much as when comparing the RX 5700 XT with the RX Vega 64.

In other words: It can be assumed that Big Navi the 50 percent increase in performance per watt rather about higher performance than a significantly lower power consumption will realize.

This coincides somewhat with AMD's claim, according to Computerbase, to enable "smooth 4K gaming without compromises and restrictions" with RDNA2.

The RX 5700 XT often achieves values ​​below 40 fps in our benchmark titles with 4K resolution and very high to maximum details. The above statement can be interpreted very differently, but we suspect that AMD means values ​​in the range of 60 fps and more at comparable levels of detail.

When will the new graphics cards come? AMD speaks of a release of the first RDNA2 graphics cards at the end of 2020. By then at the latest, we should know whether it can reliably achieve 60 fps in 4K.