It’s by no means a shock when a graphics card maker declares, ‘Hey, there are going to be new graphics cards this year!’ however we could possibly be seeing much more GPUs from AMD in 2020 than we first thought. Announced throughout their newest monetary Q&A with buyers, AMD’s head woman Dr. Lisa Su confirmed that not solely will we be getting refreshes of their current Navi graphics playing cards – that’s, the Radeon RX 5700, RX 5700 XT, RX 5600 XT and RX 5500 XT – however that we’ll additionally see AMD’s next-gen Navi playing cards arrive by the top of the yr as properly. Could we lastly see some competitors for Nvidia’s RTX Super playing cards?
Exact particulars of which graphics playing cards can be getting a refresh are nonetheless skinny on the bottom, however given the RX 5600 XT launched just some weeks in the past, I’d think about that’s in all probability fairly far down the listing. Instead, the most probably candidates could be the RX 5700 and the RX 5700 XT, which launched final July and went straight into our best graphics card listing – though fairly how AMD will differentiate between the previous and new refreshes is anybody’s guess. They’ve been crushed to the punch on ‘Super’. Maybe ‘XTcellent’ or ‘XTraordinary’? I’m right here all week.
Indeed, all Dr. Su mentioned about AMD’s 2020 Navi refresh was the next (as transcribed by Anandtech):
“In 2019, we launched our new architecture in GPUs, it’s the RDNA architecture, and that was the Navi based products. You should expect that those will be refreshed in 2020 – and we’ll have a next generation RDNA architecture that will be part of our 2020 line-up. So we’re pretty excited about that, and we’ll talk more about that at our financial analyst day.”
I’d think about the “next generation RDNA” playing cards can be AMD’s high-end 4K playing cards, presumably with built-in ray tracing assist to rival Nvidia’s RTX Super playing cards (or no less than that’s what the hearsay mill is presently whispering), however till AMD announce additional particulars it’s simply one other huge previous guessing game.
The bigger query is whether or not Nvidia will reply in variety. They’ve had a behavior of attempting to gazump each new AMD launch during the last yr, both by introducing their very own RTX Super playing cards, as they did with the RX 5700, RX 5700 XT and RX 5500 XT, or by reducing the worth of their current playing cards, like they did with the RTX 2060 when the RX 5600 XT launched earlier within the month.
The RTX 2080 Ti, for instance, is the one RTX card that hasn’t seen a Super model arrive but, in order that could be on the playing cards (pardon the pun) for later within the yr to counter no matter AMD have up their sleeve. Still, contemplating Nvidia have already refreshed most of their RTX and GTX 16-series playing cards, perhaps they’ll simply go and launch their next-gen RTX 30-series (or regardless of the heck they’re going to name them) as a substitute.
Either approach, it seems like one other thrilling yr for brand spanking new graphics card releases, whether or not you’re upgrading to the newest and biggest or hoping to seize one among final yr’s playing cards on a budget. Will 2020 be the yr of AMD? Only time will inform.
