AMD RDNA3 Refresh Planned For H2 2023, Navi33 Faces Similar Issues As Navi31

Abdullah FaisalPublished on December 12, 2022
Abdullah Faisal is a certified Google IT Support Professional.
AMD

The reviews for AMD’s RDNA3-based RX 7900 GPUs have gone live with mixed reactions from the community. On one hand, the 7900 XTX is on par with the RTX 4080 but is still miles away from the initial expectations. Many hardware experts have speculated that Navi31, the GPU on which the 7900 XTX/XT is based faces some serious bugs. The worst part is that these bugs are on a hardware level, so a mere software update won’t do consumers any good.

Navi31, What Went Wrong

Saying that RDNA3 is not a good architecture would be a totally baseless statement. The RX 7900 XTX and the 7900 XT are more than capable GPUs. However, this architecture was expected to break the 3GHz barrier. If we put 2 and 2 together, this simple frequency lead might have been AMD’s trump card against NVIDIA. Even in its current state, the RX 7900 XTX draws significantly more power than the RTX 4080.

The ‘lower-than-expected’ leaked benchmarks had similar claims throughout the community. These official reviews are just a confirmation of a possible underlying problem. All The Watts, a relatively new leaker claims that Navi31 is underperforming due to a few bugs. The actual nature of this issue is unknown, though we speculate it has something to do with the frequency. 

https://twitter.com/All_The_Watts/status/1602325817643655168

Further in the thread, All The Watts says that Navi33 is also a victim of the same bugs that Navi31 faces. It is important to note that Navi33 is based on a Monolithic design so this issue is not a result of the new MCM chiplet design. Either way, the bugs were reportedly found too late and signals that these GPUs have already entered mass production. 

In addition, Navi32 and the Phoenix APUs will address most of these bugs with RDNA3+ (Refresh) being the complete fix. Interestingly, we expected Navi32 to be announced earlier. However, it seems that Navi33 may arrive earlier though, this is just a speculation from our side. It could be possible that AMD was quick to resolve all bugs with Navi32. 

RDNA3 Refresh Release Date

We currently have no information about the RDNA3+ GPUs apart from a possible RX 7950 XT. Navi31 and Navi33 will refresh along with Navi32 and Phoenix with a possible release date of H2 2023. So it seems that AMD will not have an answer to NVIDIA’s RTX 4070 Ti at CES next month. Stay tuned at Appuals for more news like this.

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Abdullah FaisalPublished on December 12, 2022
Abdullah Faisal is a certified Google IT Support Professional.
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Abdullah Faisal


With a love for computers since the age of five, Abdullah has always sought to delve into the depths of information, and uses it as his guiding light. He believes success is of utmost importance as history is written by the victor.