A while back AMD had sent their pull request for the upcoming Linux driver which included support for the unannounced Navi 12 and Navi 14 GPUs. As per rumors, these will be the big Navi or high-end Navi and the low-end Navi, respectively. The support has now been finally queued along with the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager graphics driver for the Linux 5.4 kernel cycle, set to land in September.
This isn’t the first mention of Navi 12 and 14. These GPUs have been spotted in the driver code multiple times, although no release date has been mentioned. AMD could release these cards before the September cycle or after, but it’s very likely that we’ll see low-end parts (Polaris) replacements in September along with the Ryzen 9 3950X and the top-end Navi 12 (RTX 2080 Ti competitor) by December or maybe even next year.
Given the gaming-centric nature of the RDNA architecture, these GPUs will be vastly superior to Vega and Polaris in gaming, giving tough competition to the NVIDIA Turing lineup. We already know Navi is quite power efficient thanks to the 7nm node, however seeing the Radeon RX 5700 XT, I really hope they release the top-end card with a better heatsink design or we’ll be getting another 290X.
There’s also some initial code for Arcturus which will be the successor to Vega in the Enterprise and Data Center space with a focus on
Read more: