RedGamingTech seems to have nurtured some really solid inside sources at AMD. They were the first to talk about the Radeon VII, second-gen Navi ray-tracing, and a host of other AMD talking points we’ve looked at over the past few months. Now, their source has spilled the beans on Navi 20, otherwise known as big Navi that AMD apparently refers to as “Nvidia-killer” in-house. We haven’t seen that level of confidence from team red ever since the phenomenal flop that was the R9 Fury/Fury X.
I was part of the Fury hype train and was genuinely hoping to see an AMD part that’d compete with the NVIDIA GeForce 980 Ti review unit that was being passed around outlets. Unfortunately, we got a big, power-hungry dud that only actually matched the 980 Ti at 4K, a resolution ill-suited to either card anyway. AMD’s not even bothered addressing that market segment since.
With that kind of history, it’s really encouraging to hear more about something called the “NVIDIA-killer.” According to RedGamingTech’s source, there’ll be two big Navi parts coming out next year, with Q2 being the most likely ETA. These are Navi 23 and Navi 21. 23 is what’s being called “NVIDIA-killer” in-house. While there is no confirmation, the source mentioned that it was implied that these would be second-gen Navi parts (as opposed to a large First-gen Navi) and that they’d support hardware-level ray-tracing. After the success of the Ryzen 3000 CPUs, AMD is apparently looking to retake the performance crown from NVIDIA’s Tis and the Titans in the GPU space.
These Navi 20 series cards will be based on the 2nd Gen RDNA architecture which will be a step up from its predecessor, ditching the last few vestiges of GCN. The nest-gen Xbox Scarlett and PlayStation 5 consoles will also be based on a Navi 20 (or similar) GPU, with dedicated ray-tracing units akin to NVIDIA’s RTCores.
Whether or not this will actually happen remains to be seen. NVIDIA will most likely be releasing their own 7nm Ampere graphics cards to compete and we’re also going to be seeing Intel’s Xe debut. But however you slice it, next year’s going to be a BIG deal for the graphics market.
Further Reading:
- Best CPU for Gaming 2019 (August)
- Next-Gen AMD Ryzen 4000 APUs (7nm Renoir) Get Early Linux Support
- Amazon Selling Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700XT Gaming OC for $419.99