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AMD Promises High-End Radeon RX Navi GPUs and Navi APUs – Heavily Investing in Ray Tracing For 2020 Discrete GPUs

In a round table Q/A session with the tech press, AMD's CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, promised high-end Navi based Radeon RX graphics card and Navi based APUs. While many were expecting to hear some word about AMD's high-end Navi products at AMD's CES 2020 keynote, they were kind of left disappointed when no such announcement or even a teaser was displayed, however, AMD's CEO has confirmed that Navi based high-end Radeon RX cards in the works and we should expect them in 2020.

AMD Promises High-End Navi Based Radeon RX GPUs & Next-Generation Navi GPU Powered APUs, Also Heavily Investing in Ray-Tracing Tech!
The question about a high-end Radeon RX graphics card was raised by PC World's, Gordon Ung, who asked Lisa if AMD would have a high-end discrete graphics competitor against NVIDIA's RTX 2080 Ti or a similar tier graphics card. To this, Lisa replied that having a high-end Navi graphics card is very important and they will definitely have one but no timing or release date was unveiled.
Gordon Ung, PC World: Do you think that AMD has to have a high-end competitor in the discrete graphics market?

LS: [laughs] I know those on Reddit want a high-end Navi! You should expect that we will have a high-end Navi and that it is important to have it. The discrete graphics market, especially at the high end, is very important to us. So you should expect that we will have a high-end Navi, although I don’t usually comment on unannounced products.

Based on Lisa's statement, it seems more likely that the new Navi based high-end graphics card would be based on the 2nd Generation RDNA architecture rather than the 1st Generation which has been with us since July. It seems very likely that AMD could make a proper announcement regarding their high-end Navi graphics cards at Computex 2020 or E3 2020 with a proper launch scheduled later on. Last year, AMD unveiled their Radeon RX 5700 series cards at Computex 2019 but they have also chosen E3 2020 as a stage to preview their next-generation products too.

With that said, we are already aware of a recent rumor which pointed out that AMD's high-end Radeon RX Navi GPUs could be up to twice as fast as Navi 10, featuring a massive die size and GDDR6 memory. Some of the features to expect from 2nd Generation RDNA Navi GPUs would be:

  • Optimized 7nm+ process node
  • Enthusiast-grade desktop graphics card options
  • Hardware-Level Ray Tracing Support
  • A mix of GDDR6 and HBM2 graphics cards
  • More power-efficient than First-Gen Navi GPUs
Nothing else is stated, but from the looks of it, this could be a very powerful graphics card, marking AMD's proper return in the enthusiast high-end desktop GPU space. We also know for a fact that AMD is planning to introduce hardware-accelerated ray tracing as a primary featured of their next-generation RDNA powered GPUs. AMD stated that they are currently investing heavily in ray tracing technology and in building the ecosystem around it. Surprisingly, Lisa kind of confirms in her next statement what we just stated above which is that they will have ray tracing in their discrete GPUs as they go through 2020.
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Ray Tracing is a primary feature of the RDNA2 architecture and confirms that high-end Navi is going to end up utilizing the next-generation RDNA architecture rather than the existing one featured on Radeon RX 5000 series chips. In addition to that, both next-generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft are expected to feature ray-tracing support and RDNA2 GPUs too. We already got a teaser of the next-generation Scarlett 8K SOC from the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer so expect more details on it soon.

Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat: Is real-time ray-tracing in graphics going to be as big as NVIDIA says it is?
LS: I’ve said in the past that ray tracing is important, and I still believe that, but if you look at where we are today it is still very early. We are investing heavily in ray tracing and investing heavily in the ecosystem around it – both of our console partners have also said that they are using ray tracing. You should expect that our discrete graphics as we go through 2020 will also have ray tracing. I do believe though it is still very early, and the ecosystem needs to develop. We need more games and more software and more applications to take advantage of it. At AMD, we feel very good about our position on ray tracing.
AMD really has to put out a high-end Radeon RX Navi based graphics card to compete against the likes of the RTX 2080, RTX 2080 SUPER and the RTX 2080 Ti. There are also reports that the next-gen Ampere GeForce GPUs could be as much as 50% faster and twice as efficient than the current Turing GPUs while offering significant increases in ray-tracing performance through hardware-level changes.
 
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llien

Member
Heavily Investing in Ray Tracing For 2020 Discrete GPUs
AMD is planning to introduce hardware-accelerated ray tracing as a primary featured of their next-generation RDNA powered GPUs





Remind me, how many games have had RT included upfront so far? Whopping TWO games? Yeah, cool stuff, will absolutely take off any day now.
And it totally needs "gsync' like hardware bit, that is otherwise unusable:

 
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High-end compared with RTX 2080 or compared with Ampere?
It depends, 5800 series is the 2080 contender but we still don't know about ampere & if the 5900 series will compete with it ( wich i doubt).
Wait for the RX 6000 series to compete with Ampere.
 

ethomaz

Banned
It depends, 5800 series is the 2080 contender but we still don't know about ampere & if the 5900 series will compete with it ( wich i doubt).
Wait for the RX 6000 series to compete with Ampere.
So it won’t really compete on high-end?
Because Ampere releases in May/June.
 

llien

Member
if the 5900 series will compete with it ( wich i doubt).
Wait for the RX 6000 series to compete with Ampere.

Why wouldn't current stack compete with it? Do you honestly expect NV to seriously bump up perf/$?
E.g. 3050 that is... no wait, xx50 cards suck traditionally, bad example.

Say, 3060 card, that is as fast as 2070 and costs close to 2070. Why wouldn't 5700/5700XT compete with it?

Ampere will use 7nm EUV (20%-ish better than DUV that 5xxx are using) it's not night and day, especially when one counts in the green greed aspect.
 
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So it won’t really compete on high-end?
Because Ampere releases in May/June.
As a company that is what you are supposed to say, what do you mean by high end tho ? Ampere or Turing ?
they are not gonna say : it will compete with RTX & when Ampere gets release you have to wait for our products, we are working on 5nm GPU's.
 
Why wouldn't current stack compete with it? Do you honestly expect NV to seriously bump up perf/$?
E.g. 3050 that is... no wait, xx50 cards suck traditionally, bad example.

Say, 3060 card, that is as fast as 2070 and costs close to 2070. Why wouldn't 5700/5700XT compete with it?

Ampere will use 7nm EUV (20%-ish better than DUV that 5xxx are using) it's not night and day, especially when one counts in the green greed aspect.
To be honest i'm not expecting Nvidia to let AMD beat them like they did Intel (dirty, savage) :messenger_grinning_smiling:, competition is what gonna make Nvidia bump perf/$ and if they don't too bad for them, people would happilly buy AMD cards instead.
Also Ampere is rumored to be 50% more powerful than turing, they have better power consumption aswell.
 
I'm excited to see what comes of all of this.
But I have a feeling I'll be dissapointed when these high end amd cards compare with Ampere.
But we'll see.
 

ethomaz

Banned
As a company that is what you are supposed to say, what do you mean by high end tho ? Ampere or Turing ?
they are not gonna say : it will compete with RTX & when Ampere gets release you have to wait for our products, we are working on 5nm GPU's.
Well that is how they become competitive against Intel... they had to jump some "gens" to catch up and even surpass.
I think AMD needs to think like to be competitive in high-end against the new nVidia product and not the one launched over a year ago (to be fair Turing will have 2 years when AMD launch RDNA2).
 
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thelastword

Banned
There's no need for AMD to chase after the 2080ti anymore, RDNA 2.0 will be going up against Ampere.......If Ampere is late, AMD can just release a 5nm RDNA 2.0 refresh with perf and arch improvements or transition to RDNA 3.0 in 2021...….I think RDNA 2.0 should hit in August-September of this year...
 

Leonidas

Member
It's too bad that by the time these actually launch Ampere will basically be right around the corner. AMD is still catching up to Turing cards from 2018, and it's now the year 2020.
 

evanft

Member
Promises promises promises. Wait for *insert name of new architecture here*. Same shit, different year from AMD.
 

Elios83

Member
While AMD is ruling the CPU market easily at this point and basically reinforced that at CES, in the GPU market they're still not really competitive in the high end sector. They don't need that to be successful globally but it has been pretty much a fact so far.
Their next gen architecture will be interesting to look at also because their ray tracing solution will power both PS5 and the next Xbox but with nVidia launching new 7nm cards this year, unless RDNA2 offers a significant performance/watt improvements over current Navi RDNA, they will find themselves again one gen behind.
 

GHG

Gold Member
They really need to get their shit together at the top end of the market and bring Nvidia back in line.

Let us all pray.
 
It's too bad that by the time these actually launch Ampere will basically be right around the corner. AMD is still catching up to Turing cards from 2018, and it's now the year 2020.
Amd was also catching up to Intel for the past decade and look at the situation now.
I'm just saying.
 
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