It seems like AMD’s upcoming Navi graphics cards will follow a price trend similar to the Radeon VII. According to a Sapphire PR Manager, there will be two Navi SKUs, one priced at $399 to counter the similarly priced GeForce RTX 2060 while the other will cost $499 and will go up against the RTX 2070. As reported earlier, in the high-end space, AMD’s offerings will be limited to the Radeon VII.
Update: It looks like the Sapphire rep wasn’t bluffing. The source link has been taken down now. This means the info we got earlier was most likely on point and it’s possible that the guy who leaked it might get axed.
This is rather troubling news. While speaking to the Chinese press, the same PR rep also claimed that the Navi cards won’t support ray tracing on a hardware level and like the GeForce GTX cards will rely on DXR’s software fallback layer. He went on to deny the existence of a higher-end Navi part that could potentially challenge NVIDIA’s RTX 2080 Ti and clarified that Navi will solely succeed Polaris in the mid-range market and nothing more. He also dropped a few hints regarding the launch date of the 7nm GPUs. They could see a release on 7th May (07/07) as speculated earlier with a possible reveal at Computex 2019.
Related:
AMD Radeon Navi GPUs Surface on AoTS and 3DMark; 8GB VRAM and 1GHz Core…
Navi Pricing Justified?
So is this pricing justified? Absolutely not. AMD seems to be taking advantage of the outrageous price-points of the RTX cards and trying to make some money out of the whole situation. They did it with the Radeon VII and seems like the Navi GPUs won’t be any different. At least the RTX Turing cards come with H/W level ray tracing support along with Tensor Cores for DLSS capability.
The only way these prices can be justified is if the Navi graphics cards are notably faster than the competing GeForce RTX offerings (i.e, the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070), otherwise, just like the Radeon VII, they won’t be of much relevance to the average gamer. It is important to note that now many RTX 2060 cards are available for $349 and so even if AMD’s new 7nm parts are a bit faster at $399, it still might be enough. Let us know what you think in the comments below!
Read more:
A Plague Tale Innocence PC Performance and Graphics Analysis