AMD Radeon Navi GPU reportedly spotted at compubench

We've been hearing a lot about AMD's upcoming Navi GPU. This 7nm based graphics card would feature in both Sony as well as Microsoft's upcoming next-gen consoles. 

Also, it will be the first new architecture in AMD's aging mid-range GPU lineup in quite a while. Team red has been stuck on Polaris architecture for almost half a decade now. But, a new unknown Radeon GPU has been spotted on CompuBench which might turn out to be the elusive Navi chip.

The leaked benchmark compares the supposed Navi GPU to the Radeon RX 580. However, its worth noting that the latter is run using the OpenGL while the former leverages the much faster DirectX API.

Hence, it would be unfair to compare the two, but just for the sake of it, the Navi GPU seems to be 30-40% faster than the RX 580. The DX score of the RX 580 should be notably higher and should close the gap down to around 20-30%. However, this isn't the interesting part.

A bunch of compute-intensive benchmarks are also included in the leak and here both Radeons have been tested using the OpenGL API. 

Surprisingly, the Navi falls flat in the FP16 based facial recognition test as well as in the optical flow simulation. However, it does perform admirably in other PhysX tests and video composition run.

This purported Navi chip appears to have 20 CUs which translates into 1280 shaders. Comparatively, the Radeon VII (although a high-end part) has 3,840 shaders with remaining 4 CUs disabled. This puts the shader performance of the Polaris successor at roughly a third of the recently launched 7nm based Vega GPU.

Looking at the performance figures above, it is likely that AMD will be looking towards the GDDR6 memory to make up for the limited CUs. HBM is not an option, given the shortage and its high price.

So, in a nutshell, if this is the Navi GPU at all, it seems to be optimized for sheer graphics performance, rather than compute-based calculations unlike Nvidia's chips. Given that team green's GTX 1660 Ti is priced similar but it pretty much blows RX 580 out of the water, AMD will have to launch Navi GPUs at rather tempting prices.

Much more about Navi is to come out in coming days.