The Big Navi is coming in 2020 according to Dr Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD. This should be the first Radeon RX card using an RDNA2 GPU. The use of the word ‘big’ is of particular interest here, of all the promises that are made about new graphics cards or GPUs we often hear variations on a theme of better, faster, smarter, but it’s rare for a CEO to describe a new card as simply big. Given what we’ve seen AMD doing to the CPU market with Threadripper cheerfully bulldozing their way through expectations in terms of core count, the idea of ‘Big Navi’ carries intent.
So what do we know so far? RDNA2 is intended to be AMDs first GPU that can employ ray-tracing. It is also quite possible that the graphics hardware in the next generation Microsoft and Sony consoles will be RDNA2 based with ray-tracing support. Once rumours start to involve consoles of course there is a tendency for things to get overblown, with terms like 8K resolution being dropped into the conversation (which might require some folks to sit down and think about the difference between what is ‘possible’ in terms of putting something on a list of things a component could theoretically do, and what is ‘possible’ in terms of resolutions you might feasibly play a game at).
However some information has been floating around about the potential specifications of Navi 21 aside from the console angle and the possibility that performance could be double that of the Navi 10 GPUs currently in circulation.
These are of course all just rumours for now, and we’ll know more over the coming months. One thing for certain is that if Big Navi is going to try to unseat the Nvidia cards at the top of the enthusiast heap, it’s going to need to be very big indeed.