AMD’s chief executive has confirmed that a high-end Navi graphics card will be released this year.
In a video interview entitled ‘The Bring Up’ posted on YouTube by AMD (see below), Lisa Su noted that people were wondering about Big Navi – said high-end GPU, which has previously been referred to as the ‘Nvidia killer’ in terms of how it will take on the top-end RTX cards.
The CEO then said: “I can say you’re going to see Big Navi in 2020.”
This is the first concrete confirmation we’ve had that AMD will definitely be unleashing its big graphics firepower this year, although rumors have always pointed to this, and indeed comments that Su made in a recent roundtable Q&A session at CES 2020.
At CES, the CEO stressed how important a top-end GPU was to AMD, and said that “you should expect that we will have a high-end Navi, although I don’t usually comment on unannounced products”.
The hint was certainly that this GPU would arrive in 2020, but she didn’t actually say that. So at least now we have a confirmation, even if that really isn’t a surprise to anyone who’s been following AMD’s rumored progress in the graphics card arena lately.
Battle of the flagships
There has been no shortage of speculation around all this, including that the high-end graphics card could be 30% faster than Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Ti (if the unknown GPU which is the subject of that leak is indeed Big Navi, and that’s a fairly sizeable if).
Of course, AMD needs to move quickly enough with the release to make sure it isn’t competing against the RTX 3080 Ti (which might be up to 50% faster than its Turing predecessor, so the rumor mill reckons – although that might be just with ray tracing).
Nvidia’s next-gen Ampere GPUs are expected to launch in the latter half of 2020, in case you were wondering.
Another potential sign that we might see the high-end Navi graphics cards sooner rather than later is that an EEC filing has just been made for the Radeon RX 5950XT. And a GPU with the same name has been filed previously (back in June 2019), indicating that the 5950XT could be the flagship model for 2020. As ever, we need to take such speculation with a good degree of caution, though.