NVIDIA has already set the launch date for its upcoming Ampere-powered consumer graphics cards, and there are equally just as many rumours over just how much graphics memory the new top-tier model will be getting. Over at team AMD, news about its “Big Navi” GPU lineup has been scarce, but as these things usually go, new information about its high-end GPU’s memory capacity has surfaced.
According to a Chiphell user by the name of wjm47196, AMD’s Big Navi – codenamed Navi 21 – will reportedly have two graphics memory capacities: one with 16GB GDDR6 and the other with 12GB. Unsurprisingly, reports are also saying that it’s 16GB variant will have full access to the full 80 Compute Units (CUs). While the 12GB variant will have some of those CUs disabled or locked away on the card so that AMD can sell it at a lower price point.
Additionally, Navi 21 is also expected to ship out with 5120 Stream processors, which is double the number of Stream processors found on the current Radeon RX 5700XT’s GPU, and that number still sounds just as monstrous when we first heard of it.
Sadly, there’s still no concrete information about the performance of the GPUs, but considering the number of CUs, Stream processors, and onboard ray-tracing hardware that they are expected to ship out with. There are those that speculate that these cards could be on par with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 Super, respectively.
But while that may sound impressive from an AMD standpoint, it’s important to remember that, once again, NVIDIA is already preparing to move on to the next stage with its soon to be announced GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards lineup. On that note, we’ll just have to wait until the launch of its RDNA2 GPUs that’s supposed to be happening sometime next month.
