TECH NEWS – According to their statement, shader pre-fetching works perfectly on AMD Radeon 7900 XT and XTX graphics controllers; thank you very much.

AMD has dismissed reports that its new Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX graphics cards suffer from a performance-affecting bug. The company said that the shader pre-fetching hardware in the new graphics chips is working fully as designed, despite rumours to the contrary.

Reports of bugs in the RDNA 3 shader pre-fetching hardware came to light when a firmware flag was discovered that appeared to disable the shader pre-fetching function.

AMD clarified in a statement to Tom’s Hardware that the feature in question was a specific experimental feature. So not the shader pre-fetching hardware as a whole.

“The code in question controls an experimental function which was not targeted for inclusion in these products and will not be enabled in this generation of product. This is a common industry practice to include experimental features to enable exploration and tuning for deployment in a future product generation,” the company told Tom’s Hardware.

Of course, it is quite common, if not universal, for all significant, complex chips to have hardware bugs. It is equally common for certain features to be disabled. Precisely what constitutes a severe bug and what is merely a feature being tested for full implementation in future hardware is open to interpretation (and, of course, misunderstanding) by both chipmakers and industry observers.

What is certain is that the new AMD GPUs do not quite achieve the stated goals. The clock speeds of the 7900 XT and XTX are arguably disappointing. Especially for an architecture that AMD claims is designed for 3GHz and beyond. Most importantly, the performance of the new GPUs is somewhat inconsistent – awe-inspiring in some games, less so in others.

This is one of the reasons why many people are a little disappointed with RDNA 3: the XTX has been given ratings of around 80% in most places, which is below what you would expect from a really great new graphics card.

But that’s far from a disaster. In fact, the 7900 XT and XTX are very fast graphics cards. Just not quite the game changers we were hoping for based on AMD’s pre-release marketing information.

Is that why RDNA 3 is particularly flawed? Probably not. But equally, RDNA 3 is perhaps not quite the GPU architecture AMD initially hoped for. Given that it can’t yet directly compete at a very high level with Nvidia’s RTX 4090 kits. However, the emphasis is on the “yet”. Time will tell how competitive RDNA 3 proves to be.

Source: Tom’s Hardware