AMD’s chief executive has confirmed that a high-end Navi graphics card will be released this year.

The graphics card world (yes, that’s a thing) is currently all in a flurry. That’s because the battle between AMD and Nvidia, the big players behind basically all the best graphics cards, is heating up. AMD is rumoured to be testing the ‘Big Navi’ GPU, nicknamed the Nvidia killer. This supercharged graphics card is expected to come out in 2020, as confirmed by AMD’s CEO Lisa Su at this year’s CES. The latest rumours are suggesting there won’t be that long to wait either, as it may launch at Computex in June.

The CEO then said: “I can say you’re going to see Big Navi in 2020.”

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.

Why is the Big Navi so special? Well, according to rumors reported by TechRadar, the Big Navi (aka Navi 21 GPU, or maybe the Radeon RX 5950) will run on a completely new form of architecture, compared to previous cards. 

This new RDNA2 architecture will have 80 CUs (compute units) – that’s 5,120 stream processors. This could (emphasis on the ‘could’) make it doubly as good as AMD’s RX 5700, which has 40 CUs. It is also rumoured to feature hardware support for ray tracing, making it the first of AMD’s cards to do so.

Other rumoured features (according to WePC) include variable-rate shading, mixed-precision compute improvement, better caches, higher instructions per clock and advanced voltage regulation. Which all adds up to a pretty sexy sounding card, if it works, of course. We’ll assume that’s what the testing stage is for.

And if the rumors are to be believed, this means AMD’s new card will be in a strong position to fight off the competition from big rival Nvidia. This new super graphics card could end up being 30 percent faster than Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (number one in our best graphics card roundup), so the nickname Nvidia killer may well be appropriate.

But AMD needs to work swiftly because of the rumored Nvidia’s new guardian angel, the RTX 3080 Ti (which is rumored be up to 50% faster than its Turing predecessor).

northner

A technology enthusiast who loves to create and break things. Love to work on Linux, technology, and Computers.  I am a CyberSecurity aficionado, and wannabe wildlife Photographer constantly learning and experiencing new things.