The AMD Big Navi RDNA 2 graphics card will reportedly offer performance on par with the Nvidia RTX GeForce 2080 Ti and will launch as a rival to the Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3080.
Although early reports claimed that AMD Big Navi would be an “Nvidia killer”, a new report from Coreteks suggests that Red Team’s next-generation GPUs might not be as powerful as previously thought.
AMD has reportedly started sharing information about incoming graphics cards, codenamed Sienna Cichlid, with plug-in board (AIB) partners, who have claimed that Big Navi GPUs will only be 15% more powerful than Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Ti, and that’s in AMD’s “optimized” titles.
That’s a far cry from initial rumors that AMD’s next-generation flagship GPU would offer 50% more performance than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, and suggests that the graphics card will launch as a competitor to the GeForce RTX 3080.
While this news may be disappointing to some, and means that Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Ti flagship could not be in direct competition, AMD is planning to price its RDNA 2 flagship to undermine Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 in a bid to offer consumers better value in the high end market
AIB sources for the report also suggest AMD will have two Big Navi GPUs at launch; probably a premium and low-end offer. AMD’s low-end Navi SKUs will also be competitive with other Nvidia RTX 30 offerings, according to the report.
These will reportedly be the only Big Navi GPUs to launch this year, with so-called ‘Navy Flounder’ graphics cards arriving in the first quarter of 2021 as a mid-range version of the flagship graphics cards.
The Coreteks report also suggests that AMD plans to unveil its first Big Navi GPUs at an event in early September, with a launch planned for October 7. According to reports, Nvidia plans to launch its Ampere GPUs on September 17, we wouldn’t be surprised if The Red Team was planning a reveal to coincide with the long-awaited launch of Nvidia.
