AMD Navi 31 GPU rumor: at least 2.5x faster than the Radeon RX 6900 XT

We heard some rumbles about AMD's upcoming Navi 33 GPU just over 24 hours ago now, and now it's time for news on the bigger, next-gen Big Navi GPU -- Navi 31 which is reportedly up to 3x faster than Navi 21 that powers the Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards.

KittyYYuko was behind the recent Navi 33 rumors and is now fueling the new Navi 31 rumors, where in reply to Paul Eccleston from RedGamingTech on Twitter who said Navi 31 and Navi 32 would have MCM designs (multi-chip modules) with 2 chiplets for compute (with 80 compute units each) and 1 x I/O die.

He said that Navi 33 was a monolithic GPU with 80 compute units (the way GPUs have been made for decades) while performance-wise, Navi 31 is "about 2.5x faster than Navi 21". Navi 31 will reportedly have similar ray tracing power as NVIDIA, with Eccleston saying that it would be "a tiny bit slower like for like" while machine learning "still handled as lower precision ops".

• Read more: AMD Navi 33 GPU: next-gen RDNA 3 with 80 CUs + 5120 cores = beast GPU
• Read more: AMD Navi 31 teased: chiplet GPU design should be revealed this year
• Read more: AMD Navi 31 spotted: is this Bigger Navi? GeForce RTX 3090 destroyer?!

KittyYYuko replied, saying "2.5x is too little" and to "take a guess".

But, if you rewind back to January 1, 2021 when Kepler_L2 said that while he couldn't confirm 100% at the time he knew that Navi 31 was an 80 CU chiplet with the top SKU (think the Radeon RX 7900 XTX or something) has 2 x Navi 31 GPUs meaning 160 CUs total -- something that would truly stomp all over every single GPU on the market right now including NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 3090.

AMD's new RDNA 3 architecture is totally new, so expect some rather large gains over RDNA and RDNA 2 -- with AMD itself promising double the performance per RDNA architecture and it seems they're right on the money there. RDNA 2 has virtually 100% performance gains over RDNA with the Radeon RX 6800 XT kicking the ass of the previous-gen RDNA-powered flagship Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card.

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But the new Navi 33 and especially the Navi 31 GPU sounds incredible, the GPU chiplet technology that AMD will use on the top-tier Navi 31 and Navi 32 designs should be very revolutionary, offering some truly huge leaps in performance.

• Read more: AMD teases next-next-gen GPU: says RDNA 3 teams in execution
• Read more: AMD's next-gen RDNA 3: revolutionary chiplet design could crush NVIDIA
• Read more: AMD Zen 4 and RDNA 3, NVIDIA Hopper GPU, and Intel Xe: all 5nm on TSMC

AMD's next-gen RDNA 3-based GPUs will be made on 5nm at TSMC, including the Navi 33 and Navi 31 chips that we've already heard about. TSMC will be making AMD's next-gen Zen 4 chips, NVIDIA's next-gen Hopper GPUs and Intel's new Xe GPUs all on its new 5nm process node.