Eagle-eyed observers over at PC Games Network have narrowed down the potential release timeframe for AMD’s “2080 Ti Killer,” the Navi 12. How do we know this when AMD themselves have had very little to say?
It comes from commit notes to the Mesa 3D Graphics Library. Okay, first things first, what’s Mesa 3D? Mesa is an alternative graphics driver for AMD graphics cards running on Linux. AMD’s own AMDGPU drivers…well, they suck on Linux, to put it nicely. Mesa’s optimized for better performance. Even if you’re not a regular Linux user, Mesa drivers represent the best possible way for users with an AMD processor and GPU to run the CEMU emulator.
Back to the matter at hand, though. Marek Olsak, in a commit to the Mesa source, added a little comment referencing the addition of Navi 12 support. He described it as “trivial and urgent.” Trivial is understandable as its not likely difficult for Mesa to support Navi 12 out of the box. “Urgent” is a lot more interesting. The update was added to Mesa 19.2. Yet, Mesa 19.3 is scheduled to arrive in October. Adding Navi 12 support to Mesa 19.2 implies that Navi 12 could arrive in as little as a few weeks from now. Let’s wait and watch.
The Navi 12 graphics card will most likely be called the Radeon RX 5800 or 5900, and go up against NVIDIA’s top-dogs, the GeForce RTX 2080 Super and the 2080 Ti. This is a much–needed card, as the enthusiast segment has had no competition in the last 2-3 years. The 2080 Ti is a solid card but sells north of the $1,000 mark (1 lac in India) which doesn’t justify the 15% performance advantage it has over the 2080 S. The RTX 2070 Super is roughly 20-25% faster but costs nearly a third of the Ti’s price. If AMD manages to challenge the Turing flagship, we can expect a 2080 Ti Super or price cuts to the existing one.
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Good stuff, really looking forward to it. I vividly recall the Vega fiasco which you’d think would be reason enough to not believe any of this, but given that Navi with just 40CUs is double digit percent points faster than the V64 and on par with the 7nm Radeon VII while reducing power draw by 25% from the wall, yeah…I’m excited and looking forward to this.