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[sonomamashine]

AMD has reaffirmed their previous statements that we will get to see the 'Big Navi' GPU in action in 2020. The statement comes from AMD's CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, in the latest video titled 'The Bring Up' where the main guest of the show was Lisa herself, confirming that AMD's next-generation RNDA2 based Radeon RX enthusiast graphics card will be arriving this year.

AMD's CEO Reaffirms 'Big Navi' GPU Based Enthusiast Radeon RX Graphics Cards Launching This Year
Right after CES 2020, AMD did a round table Q/A session with the tech press and promised high-end Radeon RX graphics cards based on the Navi architecture along with Navi GPUs to be used in the company's next-generation Ryzen mobile processors which would arrive next year. AMD didn't, however, confirm what GPU the high-end Radeon RX graphics lineup would utilize but it looks like AMD's CEO, Lisa Su, has confirmed that their next enthusiast lineup would indeed be powered by the Big Navi GPU.

This is the first confirmation that the Big Navi GPU exists and that it would be the one powering AMD's enthusiast Radeon RX graphics card lineup. We cannot say when exactly would the new high-end cards launch but an unveil at Computex 2020 seems like the most likely guess.

In the previous article, we reported that AMD was definitely working on their high-end Radeon RX graphics card which would feature hardware-accelerated ray tracing, something which AMD has been heavily investing in. Ray Tracing is a primary feature of the RDNA2 architecture and confirms that high-end Navi is going to end up utilizing the next-generation RDNA architecture rather than the existing one featured on Radeon RX 5000 series chips. In addition to that, both next-generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft are expected to feature ray-tracing support and RDNA2 GPUs too. We already got a teaser of the next-generation Scarlett 8K SOC from the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer so expect more details on it soon.

Gordon Ung, PC World: Do you think that AMD has to have a high-end competitor in the discrete graphics market?
LS: [laughs] I know those on Reddit want a high-end Navi! You should expect that we will have a high-end Navi and that it is important to have it. The discrete graphics market, especially at the high end, is very important to us. So you should expect that we will have a high-end Navi, although I don’t usually comment on unannounced products.
Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat: Is real-time ray-tracing in graphics going to be as big as NVIDIA says it is?
LS: I’ve said in the past that ray tracing is important, and I still believe that, but if you look at where we are today it is still very early. We are investing heavily in ray tracing and investing heavily in the ecosystem around it – both of our console partners have also said that they are using ray tracing. You should expect that our discrete graphics as we go through 2020 will also have ray tracing. I do believe though it is still very early, and the ecosystem needs to develop. We need more games and more software and more applications to take advantage of it. At AMD, we feel very good about our position on ray tracing.

With that said, we are already aware of a recent rumor which pointed out that AMD's high-end Radeon RX Navi GPUs could be up to twice as fast as Navi 10, featuring a massive die size and GDDR6 memory. Some of the features to expect from 2nd Generation RDNA Navi GPUs would be:

• Optimized 7nm+ process node
• Enthusiast-grade desktop graphics card options
• Hardware-Level Ray Tracing Support
• A mix of GDDR6 and HBM2 graphics cards
• More power-efficient than First-Gen Navi GPUs

AMD really has to put out a high-end Radeon RX Navi based graphics card to compete against the likes of the RTX 2080, RTX 2080 SUPER and the RTX 2080 Ti. There are also reports that the next-gen Ampere GeForce GPUs could be as much as 50% faster and twice as efficient than the current Turing GPUs while offering significant increases in ray-tracing performance through hardware-level changes.
An unreleased AMD GPU also showed up last week with up to 17% higher performance than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti in VR benchmarks. This could be a very early look at the high-end Navi based graphics card with unoptimized drivers but if AMD is able to outperform the RTX 2080 Ti by up to 30-40%, that would be a serious competitor in the high-end graphics segment, something that AMD seriously needs right now to get their Radeon brand moving along nicely as their Ryzen brand.

 

[Bergoglio]

Can't wait to use my new card with Horizon Zero Dawn later this year.

 

[Elektro Demon]

A mix of gddr6 and hmb2? Very interesting.
I thought they abandoned hbm2 because it's too expensive.

 

[GreatnessRD]

Just hope their drivers work. That's what have scared me off on the 5700XT. I've seen too many people complain about those Adrenaline 2020 drivers.