AMD Radeon RX 6800 launch press deck (transcript)

PRODUCT DESIGN & INNOVATION

THE FOUNDATION OF AN AMAZING PRODUCT

AMD RDNA 2 ARCHITECTURE DESIGNS GOALS

• Pushing performance with higher frequencies
• New levels of power efficiency with AMD Infinity Cache
• Designed with features for gamers

PRODUCT DESIGN GOALS

• Engineering – Exceptional thermals, PCB, and electrical
• Platform – Built with the entire PC platform in mind
• Experience – Tangible benefits for end-users

THE ROAD TO POWER EFFICIENCY
Achieving an average of 4.1X perf/watt with AMD RDNA2

[ graph where R9 290X is 1x, RX 6800 XT is 4.1x ]

EXCEPTIONAL THERMAL DESIGN

• Extended vapor chamber for maximum performance
• Graphite thermal interface material on GPU for high-performance and maximum relatability
• Die-cast aluminum frame for structural rigidity
• High-performance, ultra-soft gap pads for efficient GDDR6 and MOSFET cooling
• Zero RPM fan mode for silent operation during light workloads
• Custom-designed axial fans for outstanding cooling and quiet operation
• Premium die-cast aluminum shroud

PREMIUM PCB | INNOVATIVE ELECTRICAL

• HDMI 2.1 with FRL
• USB Type-C
• Low PCIe slot peak currents
• Premium IT-170 material
• 15 high efficiency power-stages phases
• Standard edge location of power connectors
• RGB Control [header]
• 14-layer high performance PCB with 4 layers of 2 oz. copper for exceptional power delivery

MEMORY POWER PHASE COUNTS
High performance, low power

• RX 6800 XT: 2 power phases, 8 memory devices
• RTX 3090: 4 power phases, 24 memory devices
• RTX 3080: 3 power phases  10 memory devices

PLATFORM: BUILT FOR STANDARDS
Enabled by exceptional engineering

[ A render with RX 6800 air-flow in chassis, similar to the famous RTX 30 air flow render ]

• STANDARD Air flow for push-pull chassis configuration
• STANDARD Enthusiast power draw for simple upgrades (RX 6800: 650W min, RX 6800XT: 750W min PSU)
• STANDARD Power connector and location for clean cable management

DESIGNED WITH PARTNERS IN MIND
Enabling broad ecosystem and platform partnership

• STANDARD SIZE – A 2 to 2.5 slot form factor enables seamless integration into existing chassis and partners systems
• STANDARD PCB FORM FACTOR – A common design language suited for after-market cooling including AIO liquid cooling casing
• STANDARD POWER – Suited for operation with existing enthusiast PSUs starting at 650W

EXPERIENCE – PHENOMENAL ACOUSTICS
Enabled by custom fan design and extended vapor chamber

• Radeon RX 6800 XT 6 dBA quieter than Radeon RX 5700 XT
• 70% less perceived noise with Radeon RX 6800 XT (compared to the Radeon RX 5700 XT at 35C intake),

LOW POWER IDLE AND FAST WAKE-UP
Enabled by system-level power management innovations

• Low power graphics off – 0.54X power – monitor idle vs RX 5700XT
• Display – 850ms monitor wake-up from long idle

EXCELLENT OVERCLOCKING
Extra performance on Radeon RX 6800 XT

• 14-layer premium PCB – 4 layers of 2 ounces of copper for overclocking stability
• 15 power stage phases – High efficiency power stages for clean voltage draw
• Exceptional cooling – Extra thermal and acoustics margin built-in

AMD RADEON SOFTWARE

PERFORMANCE TUNING PRESETS
Simple, one-click custom power tuning modes to improve performance or save power

BENEFITS

• QUIET – Reduces power and fan noise for cool & quiet operation with little impact on performance
• BALANCED – Default power  levels
• RAGE MODE – Takes advantage of any extra headroom on the GPU to deliver the ultimate gaming performance

INTRODUCING AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution

• Currently in development at AMD
• Stay tuned for more information as we collaborate with game developers

RASTERIZATION VS RAY TRACING

RASTERIZATION

• Traditional path for real-time graphics rendering
• Fast & Flexible
• Can look very, very good, but results not “perfect”
  • Trade-offs between performance and & quality are the norm

RAY TRACING

• Ultimate solution to recreating reality in games
• High performance cost
• Typically reserved for offline rendering

RAY-TRACING ACCELERATION 
Changes the game

• As rasterization becomes more cable and complex, its performance cost grows
• In some cases, tracing rays becomes a reasonable trade-off for improved image quality
• Hardware acceleration of ray tracing makes some ray-traced effects feasible now

SELECTIVE RAY-TRACED EFFECTS ARE NOW POSSIBLE

• Developers can judiciously deploy ray tracing to improve realism in their games
• Real-time ray tracing will involve quality and performance tradeoffs
• Developers are still learning about how best to use ray-traced effects in combination with rasterization

COMMON USES OF RAY TRACING IN HYBRID RENDERING

REFLECTIONS

• Can show reflections of objects nut currently on-screen which rasterized reflections typically miss
• Fallback option: FidelityFX Screen Space Reflections

SHADOWS

• Replaces often incredibly complex shadow volume implementations with higher-quality results

AMBIENT OCCLUSION

• More accurately renders the finer detail of light and shadow, especially in the nooks and crannies  of indirectly lit areas
• Fallback options: FidelityFX Ambient Occlusion

GLOBAL ILLUMINATION

• Attempts to model the transport of light around a  scene, especially diffuse reflections from object to object

INTRODUCING FIDELITYFX DENOISER

• Tracing rays is computation expensive, so ray-traced effects are typically sparsely sampled
• The resolution ray-traced images include some visual noise
• FidelityFX Denoiser removes this noise and produces a clean, clear image

OUR GOAL: ENABLING DEVELOPERS TO DELIVER ASTOUNDING EXPERIENCES

• The AMD RDNA 2 architecture and its ray-tracing acceleration hardware will set the standard for the industry
• AMD is working with developers to enable the use of ray-traced effects where they will have the best impact
• The goal, as always, remains fast and fluid animation with compelling results

AMD RDNA 2 DEEP DIVE

AMD RDNA 2 ARCHITECTURE

Enthusiast gaming with performance-per-watt leadership

• PERFORMANCE – Up to 2X AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT in Just Over One Year
• EFFICIENCY – Up to 54% Performance-per-Watt Gains in Same Process Node
• FEATURES  – Deliver DX12  Ultimate Experience for Every Gamer

RDNA 2 GAMING ARCHITECTURE
MORE PERFORMANCE, LESS POWER

• BREAKTHROUGH HIGH-SPEED DESIGN – High frequencies and superb efficiency
• REVOLUTIONARY AMD INFINITY CACHE – 128MB cache with extreme bandwidth at lower power
• ADVANCED FEATURES – DX12 Ultimate and support for DirectStorage API

NAVI21 GPU details

• 7nm
  • 519.8 sqmm
  • 26.8 Billion Transistors
• I/O
  • x16 PCIe Gen4
  • 256 GDDR6 @ 16 Gbps peak
• Display Engine
  • HDMI 2.1, AMD FreeSync Technology, DSC, and VRR
  • Future Ready for up to 8K 120Hz
• Multi-Media Engine
  • 8K AV1 Decode
  • High Quality 8K HEV Encode Accelerator
  • H.265 B-frame support
• Command Processors
  • Graphics Engine
  • 4 Async Compute Engine
• Cache Hierarchy
  • 128MB AMD Infinity Cache
  • 4MB L2
  • 1MB Distributed L1
• Up to 80 Compute Units
  • 5120 Stream Processors
  • 320 Texture Units
  • 80 Ray Accelerators
• Geometry Processor
  • 8 Pre-Cull Prims/Cycle
  • 4 Post-Cull Prims/Cycle
• RB+
  • 1024 Hiz Pixels/Cycle
  • 256 Death Samples/ Cycle
  • 128 Pixel Launch/Cycle
  • 128 32b Pixel color write/Cycle
  • 64 64b Pixel color write/Cycle
  • 64 Pixel color blend/Cycle

BREAKTHROUGH HIGH-SPEED DESIGN 

HIGH FREQUENCY IN THE DNA

• Leverages world-class CPU design methodologies
• Streamlined micro-architecture

PERFORMANCE-POWER SCALABILITY

• Up to 1.3 frequency at the same power per CPU
• Up to 50% per CU power at the same frequency

PERFORMANCE-PER-WATT ACHIEVEMENT UP TO 54%

16% – DESIGN FREQUENCY INCREASE

• Leverages CPU high frequency expertise
• High speed performance libraries
• Streamlined micro-architecture and design
• Aggressive re-pipelined logic for speed

17% – CAC and Power Optimizations

• Pervasive fine-grain clock gating
• Clock tree splitting and gating
• Redesigned for minimal data movement
• Aggressive pipeline rebalancing

21% – Performance per Clock Enhancement

• Infinity Cache amplified low latency/power bandwidth
• TLD streamlined for latency reductions
• Redesign 32bt pipe and included new HDR format
• Optimized geometry distribution and tessellation

THE ENHANCED AMD RDNA 2 COMPUTE UNIT

• Streamlined for increased frequency and low power
• Mixed Precision Operations for tensor math
• Sampler feedback streaming and texture space shading
• Ray Accelerator: 4 Box or 1 Triangle Intersection per cycle

REDESIGNED RB+
DESIGNED GROUND UP FOR FREQUENCY, POWER, AND EFFICIENCY

• Each RB+ natively doubled the 32bpp color rate by processing eight 32-bit pixels per cycle.
• The RB+ in conjunction with Rasterization expands Variable Rate Sharing (VRS) results for 2×1, 1×2, 2×2 modes to the destination surface.

AMD RDNA 2 MESH SHADING

Mesh shader process workgroups of primitives

• A geometry front-end with the flexibility of GPU Compute

Shader-based culling and work optimizations

• Object ID, facedness, depth, occlusion
• Bouning volume
• LOD-based mesh determination
• Custom vertex and geometry data de-composition

Data reuse

• Vertex reuse on a workgroup scale

Optimized Computation

• Attribute shading only for primitives that are not culled
• Particle system physics + mesh in the same shader

AMD RDNA 2 SAMPLER FEEDBACK
Sampler feedback supports both advanced streaming and next-generation rendering

Advanced streaming

• Memory footprint optimization
• Texture filtering constrained to resident mipmap levels
• Asynchronous updates of resident texture data

Texture space rendering

• Identification of texture locations used in rasterization
• Feedback data to optimize shading workloads

AMD RDNA 2 RAYTRACING

• Dynamic Global Illumination
• Ray-traced soft shadows from area lights
• Hybrid reflections mixing compute and screen-space effects with full raytracing

AMD RDNA 2 RAYTRACING 

• 4 Ray/Box Intersections processed per CU per clock
• 1 Ray/Triangle Intersection processed per C per clock
• AMD RDNA 2 implements a high-performance ray tracing intersection acceleration architecture
  • The Ray Accelerator handles intersection of rays with the BVH, and sorting of ray intersections times
• It provides an order of magnitude increase in intersection performance compared to a software implementation
• Traversal of the BVH and shading of ray results is handled by shader code running on the Compute Units
• AMD Infinity Cache can hold a very high percentage of the BVH working set, reducing intersection latency

AMD RDNA VARIABLE RATE SHADING

• AMD RDNA2 variable rate sharing is designed to deliver the maximum usability and flexibility for developers
• Fine grained rate selection (per 8×8 pixels) makes it easier to select the appropriate shading date for each region. Larger regions could cause more image quality or performance compromises.
• AMD RDNA 2 supports coarse shading rates up to 2×2 with consistent and predictable performance improvements. Up to 4x improvements in effective shading throughput are attainable.

AMD INFINITY CACHE BENEFITS

• 1.3 pJ Infinity Cache Access vs 7-8 pJ GDDR6 Access (Average hit rates for 4K titles up to 58%)
• AMD Infinity Cache unleashes the potential of high-frequency GPU
• Performance gains with a frequency significantly amplified with the cache
• Key to unlocking more power-efficient gaming performance
• A larger configuration will generally mean higher latency (wasted power and lower performance)
• But with Radeon RX 6800 XT we source most of our bandwidth from the AMD Infinity Cache with up to 48% lower latency than Radeon RX 5700 XT memory
• With our higher AMD Infinity Fabric clock rates, even raw memory accesses are faster
• Combined, we get 34% reduction in average latency for improved energy efficiency and performance

BANDWIDTH ON DEMAND
Cache boost clock for turbo-charged bandwidth

• Games go through phases with widely varying bandwidth requirements
• Since AMD Infinity Cache sources most bandwidth, power management can boost om-demand
• Boost Infinity fabric clock for up to a 550 GB/s BW increase when needed, save power when not