AMD's flagship Navi GPU or 'Big Navi' as the red team themselves refer to it as has been under-development for a while now and upon release, it will go on to power next-generation Radeon RX graphics cards with a sole focus on the 4K gaming segment.
AMD's 'Big Navi' GPU Based Enthusiast Radeon RX Graphics Cards To Disrupt The 4K Gaming Segment
There aren't many details on the big Navi GPU available at the moment but during the Radeon RX 5600 XT's press briefing, AMD's Radeon Product Management Lead, Mithun Chandrasekhar, spilled the beans that like Ryzen, Big Navi is going to disrupt the 4K gaming segment.
“With the Radeon 5000-series we are essentially covering 90-something-percent of the total PC gamers today,” says Chandrasekhar. “And so that’s the reason why no 4K right now, it’s because the vast majority of them are at 1440p and 1080p.
“That doesn’t mean a 4K-capable GPU isn’t coming, it is coming, but for here and now we want to focus on the vast majority of gamers.”
“Similar to Ryzen,” he says, “all of us need a thriving Radeon GPU ecosystem. So, are we going after 4K, and going to similarly disrupt 4K? Absolutely, you can count on that. But that’s all I can say right now.”
Chandrasekhar has some valid points as to why we haven't seen a flagship 4K graphics card from AMD as of yet. According to him, the vast majority (90%) of the gaming market is composed of PC gamers who play at 1080p or 1440p resolutions.
So with the first stream of Navi Radeon RX 5000 series graphics cards such as the RX 5700 XT, RX 5700, RX 5600 XT, RX 5500 XT, they tackled those markets and they did a pretty good job at it. Aside from the Radeon RX 5500 XT which is a hit or a miss in many gaming titles against the competition, the RX 5600 XT, RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT do a really well job in delivering great performance per dollar against the Turing based GeForce GTX & GeForce RTX graphics cards.
The Radeon RX 5700 XT almost matches the GeForce RTX 2080 which is something that bodes well for the upcoming flagship part. In regards to the 'Big Navi' Radeon RX graphics cards, AMD states that we can expect the same kind of disruption in the 4K gaming segment with the enthusiast Navi graphics cards as the Ryzen processors in the mainstream and high-performance CPU segment. It looks like AMD is all set to deliver a fast and truly next-generation 4K graphics cards based on their Navi graphics architecture.
There have been a series of rumors that have emerged in relation to the 'Big Navi' GPU over the last couple of weeks. In the previous article, we reported that AMD was definitely working on their high-end Radeon RX graphics card which would feature hardware-accelerated ray tracing, something which AMD has been heavily investing in.
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.
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
An unreleased AMD GPU also showed up last week with up to 17% higher performance than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti in VR benchmarks and we even saw references to an 80CU Navi part. This could be a very early look at the high-end Navi based graphics card with unoptimized drivers but if AMD is able to outperform the RTX 2080 Ti by up to 30-40%, that would be a serious graphics contender in the high-end 4K graphics segment, something that AMD seriously needs right now to get their Radeon brand moving along nicely as their Ryzen brand.
