While AMD has been having a lot of success fighting Nvidia when it comes to mid-range graphics cards, a new rumor suggests that the company is working on two upcoming GPUs – Navi 21 and Navi 23 – which could be high-end cards that will take on the likes of Nvidia’s flagship RTX 2080 Ti.
According to RedGamingTech, a source familiar with AMD (which the site claims is pretty reliable), has revealed that the company is referring internally to the Navi 23 – which will apparently launch mid-2020 – as the ‘Nvidia killer’.
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If true, it shows how confident AMD is getting when competing with its old rival. However, the rumor doesn’t go into why this would be an ‘Nvidia killer’. It could be that it ‘kills’ Nvidia’s cards when it comes to performance, or perhaps price (AMD’s traditional area of strength). Maybe even both.
The GPU wars heat up
According to the source, AMD seems particularly confident with the Navi 23 GPU, and it will probably be based on RDNA 2.0 architecture. The first generation of RDNA allowed AMD to produce a 7nm gaming GPU with “1.25 performance per clock compared to previous 14nm processors”.
Apparently, RedGamingTech was also told that ray tracing should be coming to the new gaming cards – which isn’t too surprising, as AMD won’t want Nvidia to corner the market with that tech.
Both Xbox Scarlett and the PS5 are expected to feature ray tracing – and as both next generation consoles have graphics supplied by AMD, this part of the rumor makes a lot of sense.
The source also revealed that AMD’s CEO Lisa Su is “targeting Nvidia’s market leadership because she’s growing frustrated for not having an answer to the higher end Nvidia SKUs.”
This is all very exciting stuff, though we should remember that this is all rumor and conjecture at this point.
However, we love the idea of AMD getting fired up to hit Nvidia where it hurts, and with Intel entering the graphics card market next year with its Intel Xe GPU, 2020 is shaping up to be an amazing year for graphics cards.
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