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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.redgamingtech.com/navi-20-series-is-known-internally-as-the-nvidia-killer-exclusive/

AMD currently have an answer to Nvidia’s mid-range offerings with their RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT graphics cards, and in the next few weeks, custom variants of those GPUs will be filtering onto store shelves from AIBs[*] such as PowerColor.

But, with the discontinuation of the Radeon VII graphics cards (although, Radeon VII wasn’t that much faster than RX 5700 XT when overclocked anyway), AMD doesn’t have a graphics card to compete with Nvidia’s higher performance model graphics cards, such as the RTX 2080 Super, and of course the RTX 2080 Ti.

Navi 10 (which is the GPU found inside the heart of the RX 5700 series) goes up to 2,560 shaders (40 Compute Units), and sports the first generation RDNA architecture. This architecture is significantly more efficient than say, Vega, when it comes to gaming tasks.

There has been no shortage of rumors that the company are working on a ‘bigger die’ variant of Navi, with up to 4,096 Shaders and even Lisa Su has teased that they are coming. This is on top of several benchmark leaks for what we believe is Navi 14, which sports 24 Compute Units, and would appear to be a GPU designed around competing with Nvidia’s GTX 16 cards.

So now I have set the stage, I’d like to bring in what I was told last night by a source who has been reliable in the past via a phone call. I have in the past leaked the 7/7 release date for Ryzen 3000 and Navi (I was original source of this leak), Leaked the existence of 7nm Vega for Gamers (then also the Radeon VII details and images prior to its launch), and also leaked several things for RDNA (including the second generation featuring Ray Tracing).

[...]So basically, Navi 10 was launched because it had ‘less to go wrong’ than a huge die that would be needed to compete with say RTX 2080 Ti as there were already enough challenges. Now it’s working and they know things such as yields, AMD can proceed.

So there are two GPUs my source told me about – though it’s possible there are more that will launch next year. The first is Navi 21, and the second is Navi 23.

Navi 23 is the one I’d like to focus on if you don’t mind because this was the GPU that he learnt is known as the ‘Nvidia Killer’ internally. Now, understand this wording from AMD isn’t typical internally, and to his knowledge, this kind of confidence wasn’t shown (internally at least), by AMD Engineers either for Vega or for even Polaris launch.

[...]I was also told that Ray Tracing is definitely a goal for gaming graphics cards – and that also makes sense, as AMD sees Nvidia doing it, we’ve seen the Ray Tracing hybrid patents, we’ve seen AMD with their ‘Ray Tracing Vision’ slide, and plus I leaked it back in March.

We also know that both Microsoft and Sony are touting Ray Tracing, with Microsoft during E3 2019 verbally confirming ‘Hardware Ray Tracing’. This is important given the graphics architecture inside the console will be based on RDNA. Indeed, Lisa Su specifically said “Next Generation RDNA”, which possibly hints it’s not the first-gen Navi, but the follow up (see our all you need to know about Xbox Scarlett).

AIB: Add In Board. See this discussion on reddit.

Slightly off-topic: I like how the tech journalists are forced to mention their track record when describing the leaks/rumors they have heard.

Original Submission