AMD will take the wraps off its next-gen RDNA 2 Radeon GPUs at CES in not much more than a month’s time, likely revealing the much awaited high-end Navi graphics card, at least according to the rumor mill.
Naturally, this is highly speculative, but on the other hand, the source uncovered by Wccftech is a reputable leaker (over at the Chiphell forums) who previously revealed correct info about the initial launch of Navi.
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According to the enigmatically named Wjm47196, CES will be the stage on which AMD will unveil its first preview of the next-gen Radeon graphics cards which will be 2nd-gen RDNA – a further honed and refined architecture compared to the original Navi GPUs, in other words 7nm+ – as previous rumors have indicated.
And it’s likely that these GPUs will boast hardware acceleration to give games with ray tracing faster frame rates, and to catch up with Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards on this front.
This ties in with previous chatter from the graphics grapevine going back to August, when we first heard from another source that the high-end ‘Nvidia killer’ GPU (dubbed Navi 23 at the time) would likely be based on RDNA 2 architecture. And that this graphics card is expected to debut in mid-2020 – it’s potentially the RX 5900, which could be launched alongside an RX 5800, going by info recently obtained from Linux drivers – so a start of the year reveal would pretty much fit with all this.
We’ve also witnessed leaked roadmaps showing that RDNA 2 Radeon GPUs are in development, and all this ties in with the possibility of the next-gen consoles possibly getting RDNA 2-powered graphics solutions – remember that those consoles have AMD chips and will support ray tracing, we know that for a fact.
And most recently, don’t forget the RRA certification leak which drove considerable speculation about how this could relate to the rumored high-end Navi graphics card, and again this could indicate a launch coming sooner rather than later. Although note that all this should be taken with a considerable degree of caution – but that said, these rumors are starting to seriously mount up now…
Memory matters
With this latest revelation, Wccftech also chucks in its own speculation about the new high-end Navi card using HBM2E video memory rather than GDDR6, but we’d take that with a particularly sizeable chunk of salt. Still, who knows – it’s possible that the new high-end king could take the baton from AMD’s Radeon VII in this respect.
This latest round of spillage is definitely one of the more interesting AMD GPU rumors we’ve heard in recent times, although we have to bear something else in mind: that a ‘preview’ of these new Navi graphics cards at CES could be something very minor, such as a slight tease rather than a fuller reveal. We might not learn anything about the cards, in other words, save for their existence…
Finally, it’s worth noting that the source of this leak spilled a couple of other nuggets of info as well, including that there will allegedly be a new wallet-friendly Navi 10 desktop GPU also coming to sit under the RX 5700 somewhere.
It could be pitched around the $250 mark (around £190, AU$370) to take on Nvidia’s new GTX 1660 Super, but we’re really getting into the territory of complete guesswork now. The indication is, though, that there will be another budget-minded GPU coming from AMD.
Definitely not wallet-friendly workstation-class graphics cards will also be arriving with a new product line – which is no surprise – to be released ‘later’ down the line, the source claims, too.
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