TECH NEWS – The company’s senior vice president of graphics also promised to focus on ray tracing performance in the future.

Club386 has a lengthy interview with Scott Herkelman, AMD’s head of graphics. When “the reds” launched the RDNA 3 GPU architecture, it promised a 54% improvement in power efficiency over the previous generation RDNA 2 with chipset usage and other modifications. Still, when the product line was released, that figure didn’t turn out to be that much, while Nvidia improved efficiency on the Ada Lovelace architecture (you need a power plant for an RTX 4090, though!).

“We look at perf per watt on every chart when bringing all chips to market. In notebooks, it matters greatly. On a desktop, however, it matters, but not to everyone. Some people are concerned about power; others don’t care as much. We want to make a better perf-per-watt chip. Power is a prime initiative. You’ll see us over time get better and better at it. We need to catch up. There are still bugs that we need to fix. Idle power is one of them. We believe there is a driver fix for it. It’s a wonky one. Specifically, for the 7900 Series and even 7600, we didn’t plan on the new power cable, but the 7800 and 7700 did have a plan for it. Until this power issue is cleaned up and there’s good confidence it’s working correctly for end users, that’s when you’ll start to see us incorporate it into our planning. The ability for someone to say it’s an end-user fault is a little strange to AMD and me,” Herkelman said, touching on the unusually high idle power consumption of the RX 7000 cards and the use of the 12VHPWR power connector.

The company is still open to using this connector in the future, but manufacturers have yet to rectify design flaws; true, we’re already seeing an updated design on Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4000 cards, and most of the issues reported on the RTX 4090 are on the old solution. Herkelman has promised that ray tracing performance will be further enhanced, acknowledging that Nvidia is better at it, while AMD shows better results in terms of price-performance ratio.

Let’s hope RDNA 4 will be good.

Source: WCCFTech