Prototype of AMD Radeon RX 6000 video card may be in photo

A photo has appeared showing a prototype Big Navi video card from AMD’s RX 6000 series. The image shows that the GPU is combined with a presumably 16GB of Samsung’s gddr6 memory.

The photo, which is posted on a Chinese social network, shows the back of the printed circuit board, with two stickers containing the texts Typical XT A0 ASIC and Typical Samsung 16Gb. AMD generally uses the XT variants of GPUs for its Radeon RX video cards for gamers, which makes it plausible that the prototype is a Big Navi card.

Samsung 16Gb refers to the use of Samsung memory chips with a capacity of 16Gbit. Although the number of chips is difficult to perceive, according to VideoCardz there are eight 2GB chips, for a total of 16GB vram. The use of eight memory chips implies that AMD uses a 256-bit memory bus. The memory bandwidth would therefore be lower than that of the Nvidia RTX 3080 and 3090; they have a wider bus and faster gddr6x memory.

The printed circuit board is equipped with various switches and measuring points, as is usual with prototypes. There also appears to be a CPU cooler to cool the chip. This also happens more often with early prototypes of video cards. The authenticity of the photo cannot be guaranteed, but its release coincides with AMD’s announcement that the RX 6000 graphics cards will be unveiled on October 28.

The upcoming Radeon video cards are based on the RDNA 2.0 architecture, which is also used in the Xbox Series X and S and in the PlayStation 5. The new video cards will have support for hardware ray tracing. Earlier this year, AMD promised a 50 percent improvement in performance per watt over the RX 5000 series.