AMD dismissed reports that its new Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX (opens in new tab) graphics boards are plagued by performance-impacting bugs. AMD said the shader prefetch hardware in the new graphics chips is not fully functional as intended, despite rumors suggesting otherwise, it said.

Reports of bugs related to the RDNA 3 shader prefetch hardware appeared when a firmware flag was discovered that appeared to turn off the shader prefetch feature (open in new tab).

AMD clarified in a statement to Tom's Hardware (opens in new tab) that the feature in question was a specific experimental feature as opposed to the overall shader prefetch hardware.

"The code in question controls an experimental feature that is not targeted for inclusion in these products and will not be enabled in this generation of products," AMD told Tom's Hardware, "This is to enable investigation and tuning for deployment in future product generations, It is common industry practice to include experimental features.

Of course, it is absolutely common, if not actually universal, for large, complex chips to have hardware flaws. Likewise, it is also common that some features are not integrated. What is a serious bug and what is merely a feature being tested with an eye toward full implementation in future hardware can be interpreted and misinterpreted by both chipmakers and industry observers.

Whether this particular feature is really intended to be fully functional this time, or merely experimental as described, is something only AMD knows. So what really matters is how the new chip performs as a whole; will RDNA 3 deliver a great gaming experience?

Certainly, there are cases where AMD's new GPUs are not meeting their goals; the clock speeds of the 7900 XT and XTX are definitely disappointing for an architecture that AMD built for 3GHz and above. Most importantly, the performance of the new GPUs is somewhat inconsistent, very impressive in one game, but not so much in another.

This is one of the reasons we were somewhat disappointed with RDNA 3, with an XTX score of 81% (open in new tab), rather than the 90%+ expected of a truly excellent new graphics card. But it is not nearly as bad. In fact, the 7900 XT and XTX are very fast graphics cards. However, they are far from the game changers we expected based on pre-release marketing information from AMD.

That said, it is probably not the case that RDNA 3 is particularly buggy. But likewise, RDNA 3 is probably far from the GPU architecture that AMD originally hoped for, given that it cannot yet compete at the high end with Nvidia's RTX 4090 (open in new tab) board. But "not yet" is not the right word; time will tell how competitive RDNA 3 will be.