AMD to launch Big Navi at the end of 2020

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AMD has been trying to play catch up to Nvidia recently after the RTX 20 series graphics cards were released, enabling any gamer at home to be able to utilise the stunning capabilities of ray tracing. As we all know, AMD has yet to come out with a graphics card that supports ray tracing which has given Nvidia quite the head start, but with the next-gen consoles soon-to-announced and both capable of ray tracing support thanks to AMD’s RDNA2 structure, it looks like AMD has finally given us a hint as to when exactly we’ll ‘Big Navi’.

There’s not a lot of fun things that go on at a ‘financial analyst meeting’ including the name itself, however they do offer us a little insight into AMD’s plans for launching products throughout the year. And it turns out that the launch of the RDNA2 cards is quite a long time away. 

AMD is looking to launch the Big Navi cards at the end of 2020, which makes sense considering that the Xbox Series X and PlayStation will supposedly launch by then, and as we’ve stated before, both consoles will make use of the RDNA2 structure. Though AMD has boasted that the RDNA2 architecture is achieving a 50% performance boost per watt.

So it’s a longer wait than we all hoped for I’m afraid, but AMD has assured us that these new GPUs will be capable of ray tracing and 4K gaming, which could put it on par with Nvidia’s RTX 2080 cards. Now I’m sure Nvidia will want to speed things up and get the RTX 30 series cards out before then in order to stay ahead of the competition.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, AMD is already working on RDNA3 architecture which will be used for the Navi 3X family. Obviously, it will offer greater performance and improvements on RDNA2, but we should expect the release of RDNA3 towards the end of 2022.