AMD has been off to a good start with its mid-range Radeon RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 graphics cards giving NVIDIA a run for its money, but it still doesn’t have anything to show for in the high-end graphics card segment. On that note, a new rumour suggests that the company will only be releasing such cards this year.
The source of the rumour, RedGamingTech, says that while AMD is already working on high-end GPU – codenamed Navi 21 and Navi 23 – the brand won’t be launching cards based on the architecture until the year 2020. Further, it seems the GPUs been labelled as “NVIDIA killers”.
This is interesting, as the label could mean one of two things; the first is that AMD’s high-end GPU will be able to match NVIDIA’s high-end GeForce cards (currently the RTX 2080, RTX 2080 Super, and RTX 2080 Ti) pixel for pixel, or that they could offer gamers graphics cards with a better price-to-performance ratio. The latter being the point with all of AMD’s current offerings.
However, it’s the former point that could break AMD’s losing streak in the high-end graphics market; while its current 7nm RDNA architecture has proven to be far more efficient and powerful to its 14nm predecessor, the GPU still lacks the ability to conduct real-time ray-tracing. A feature that NVIDIA has been pushing the envelope very hard for with its current generation Turing architecture, and is apparently frustrating Dr. Lisa Su, CEO of AMD.
That may all change come next, as AMD’s next-generation RDNA GPU architecture is expected to feature real-time ray-tracing. Both for its desktop graphics cards, as well as for Microsoft and Sony’s respective next-generation Xbox Scarlett and PlayStation 5 consoles.
As always, AMD has neither confirmed or denied these rumours. So, it would be best to treat them as hearsay, or at least with a pinch of salt.
(Source: RedGamingTech via TechRadar)
