AMD confirms RDNA 2 "Big NAVI" will release for PC before the release of next gen consoles, calls it their "Halo Product"

[Master Disaster]

Speaking at the Bank Of America 2020 Securities Global Technology Conference, AMD CFO David Kumar has confirmed that we will be getting "Big Navi" on PC before the release of the PS5 and new Xbox. Since we know the next gen consoles should be releasing at some point before holiday season this year it narrows the windows down to between now and December.

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AMD has confirmed that their upcoming Big Navi graphics processor will be the first product based on RDNA 2 architecture. This means that the next-generation gaming consoles (Play Station 5 and XBOX Series X), which are also officially featuring RDNA2 based graphics, will in fact arrive after the Big Navi.

 

The statement came from AMD’s CFO Devinder Kumar, who confirmed this during the Bank of America Securities Global Technology Conference. He said that Big Navi will be AMD’s first RDNA 2 product. He admitted that “there’s a lot of excitement for Navi 2, or what our fans have dubbed as the Big Navi“, which led him to say “Big Navi is a halo product” and “enthusiasts love to buy the best, and we are certainly working on giving them the best”. 

 

He reiterated previous claims that AMD remains “on track to launch our next-generation Zen 3 CPUs and RDNA 2 GPUs in late 2020“. This means that the end of this year will bring many new gaming desktop products from AMD. The expectations are indeed growing as we await high-end Radeon GPUs. It has certainly been a quiet season for AMD Radeon fans, especially for those interested in enthusiast graphics cards. Well, considering the hype around the product, this is about to change. After all, AMD wouldn’t risk releasing a slower graphics card than the competition, or would they?

 

The confirmation that Big Navi will arrive before next-generation consoles (at point it does not matter which one arrives first), puts the launch window for Radeon RX 6000 series between September and October. Unless AMD has plans to make the announcement sooner.

He also backed up what we heard last year that RDNA2 will be a full stack of products ranging from entry level GPUs right up to the enthusiast grade gaming GPUs.

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Mr. Kumar also said that “RDNA 2 architecture goes through the entire stack“, which is something that David Wang (VP at RTG) promised last year. It means that we no longer waiting for one product, but in fact, the whole series based on RDNA2 architecture. This should fast-track the adoption of hardware-accelerated ray-tracing in games.

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-big-navi-to-arrive-before-next-generation-consoles

 

Add this to the details they've already told us (Hardware RT support and 50% PPW improvement over RDNA1) and it seems like AMD are trying to shake up the GPU market, just like they did the CPU one.

[Promosss]

Gotta love competitions, at the end of the day, the customer wins.

[3rrant]

Better to temper our expectations. It's extremely unlikely they will beat next gen NVidia 7nm GPUs. But if they can start to compete like 1st gen Ryzen vs Intel, that's just great for everyone.

 

Curious to see which hardware features will be exclusive to PS5 and which will be avaiable for everyone at this point.

 

Also it would be the first time in modern history where consoles could be really power-competitive in terms of new hardware. X360/X1/PS3/PS4 had "old stuff" at launch already compared to the computer market.

[CarlBar]

2 minutes ago, 3rrant said:

Also it would be the first time in modern history where consoles could be really power-competitive in terms of new hardware. X360/X1/PS3/PS4 had "old stuff" at launch already compared to the computer market.

 

Even with loss-leading there's simply no way the consoles will be on par in terms of raw hardware with the best AMD will be offering as a PC product, it would just cost too much for the console makers.

[3rrant]

3 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

 

Even with loss-leading there's simply no way the consoles will be on par in terms of raw hardware with the best AMD will be offering as a PC product, it would just cost too much for the console makers.

No doubt about that. There are also power-constrains to be considered. It would be like pretending to have a 15W part that does not scale at all up to 300W, it's unrealistic.

What I mean is that all previous console generations in the "modern" era of videogames were based upon old technologies. This time, they are based on new contemporary (Ryzen) or new (RDNA2) ones, which is very exciting because it leads to less diversity in platforms and ease of development. 

[Trik'Stari]

For the love of god AMD, actually try this time. Don't just offer budget shit. Actually give me something to challenge this 1080ti.

 

I really don't want to have to give Nvidia more money before Cyberpunk comes out.

[Master Disaster]

37 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

at least Nvidia has the means to prepare a hard counter, both going from their use of functional foundries, and their verbal commitment to not let AMD leapfrog them

 

gotta love this GPU season

 

EDIT: also factor in that the next Geforce GPU will be on a shrink to 7nm, and existing 7nm Radeon GPUs have been competing with 12nm Nvidia Turings...

Yeah, Intel got happy at the top and sat on ass for too long, you cannot accuse Nvidia of the same thing. They've pushed out new product on a fairly consistent basis for a long time.

 

16 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

 

Even with loss-leading there's simply no way the consoles will be on par in terms of raw hardware with the best AMD will be offering as a PC product, it would just cost too much for the console makers.

Yep, plus they could never squeeze that much power in such a small form factor without custom cooling which would compound the issue further with RnD costs. The SSD technology Sony have developed might gain them some advantage though, at least in the short term.

 

4 minutes ago, Trik'Stari said:

For the love of god AMD, actually try this time. Don't just offer budget shit. Actually give me something to challenge this 1080ti.

 

I really don't want to have to give Nvidia more money before Cyberpunk comes out.

What's wrong with the 5700XT? Its a BEAST of a card for 1440p.

[Trik'Stari]

14 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

What's wrong with the 5700XT? Its a BEAST of a card for 1440p.

I'm playing at 4k. 

[RejZoR]

As much as we were taking every past Radeon release with a grain of salt because AMD has overblown everyone's expectations almost on every release since Fury X, since Navi, I'm actually quite optimistic. RX 5700 XT is a really well performing card. I mean, in most cases it's beating GTX 1080Ti and RTX 2080. While not king of the hill territory, it shows it's very competitive and well performing card. I'm looking forward to new Navi with optimism. Especially knowing they'll support ray tracing and I wonder to what extent AMD will be able to implement its acceleration. Can't wait for its release. I'm also waiting for RTX 3000 series with excitement. We finally have some games that are worthy of it and for the rest we have shaders like RTGI (ReShade) which works and looks really good. Would be nice if NVIDIA implemented it. But we'll see. AMD likes to add features in their software so I also wonder what they'll cook up to make better use of ray tracing in general if possible. Certainly exciting times ahead!

[CarlBar]

30 minutes ago, 3rrant said:

What I mean is that all previous console generations in the "modern" era of videogames were based upon old technologies. This time, they are based on new contemporary (Ryzen) or new (RDNA2) ones, which is very exciting because it leads to less diversity in platforms and ease of development. 

 

I'm not exactly super familiar with older console specs but i was under the impression there were some pretty significant differences in how they worked making it somthing of an apples to oranges comparison anyway.

 

That said it is going to be interesting to see how much if at all the PC optimization side of things improves. You only have to look at the DOOM games to see how rough most games optimization is.I'm not sure, (don't recall seeing it tested), but i suspect they might even be playable at absolute rock bottom settings on an intel IGPU. Which is somthing virtually no other recent game with AAA graphics can claim.

[porina]

1 hour ago, Master Disaster said:

Since we know the next gen consoles should be releasing at some point before holiday season this year it narrows the windows down to between now and December.

I suppose in a way, this is "no new information" but does give us a little more confidence it will happen. If the world doesn't destroy itself before then.

 

23 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Yeah, Intel got happy at the top and sat on ass for too long, you cannot accuse Nvidia of the same thing. They've pushed out new product on a fairly consistent basis for a long time.

I'd argue up to Skylake Intel were progressing. There were tangible IPC gains between architecture updates, and between them we had the process updates happening. We had a wobbly wheel with 14nm on Broadwell, but the real trouble started on 10nm and we got Kaby lake. Yes, since then we've not had an update to desktop architecture. Which is not to say they don't have updated architectures, like the Sunny Cove out on mobile.

 

3 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

I'm actually quite optimistic. RX 5700 XT is a really well performing card. I mean, in most cases it's beating GTX 1080Ti and RTX 2080.

I did have to check as my recollection didn't place the 5700XT that high. In a quick look at Techspot it seems it still loses more often than not to a 2070S. 5700XT's main win was the lower price when it came out.

 

 

Overall it will be exciting to see what AMD can bring to the GPU area, and see how high they can go. I do hope they can clearly exceed a 2080Ti, which will have been out for about 2 years when big navi launches. Actually I probably need to clarify there. I hope big navi will beat a 2080Ti when running non-RT games. I would hope it smashes current RTX cards in that area, along with nvidia next gen RTX getting a decent performance uplift in that area specifically.

[Doobeedoo]

It was kind expected too from what we've known so far about both. They definitely need a new GPU halo product now. Current Navi is great no doubt but a flagship with much more grunt will be very welcomed. Also it's great that RDNA2 architecture will go through entire stack too. 

[3rrant]

30 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

 

I'm not exactly super familiar with older console specs but i was under the impression there were some pretty significant differences in how they worked making it somthing of an apples to oranges comparison anyway.

 

That said it is going to be interesting to see how much if at all the PC optimization side of things improves. You only have to look at the DOOM games to see how rough most games optimization is.I'm not sure, (don't recall seeing it tested), but i suspect they might even be playable at absolute rock bottom settings on an intel IGPU. Which is somthing virtually no other recent game with AAA graphics can claim.

They are apple to oranges. PS3 used a completely different architecture, system and even completely different processor units (CELL).

PS4/Xbox One are much closer to computers, with the Xbox being extremely more similiar due to the fact that it's pretty much built like a cut-down windows version and uses mostly the same libraries, where the PS4 doesn't as it sticks to a different structure and completely different kernel/os architecture. But, both consoles were much closer to their PC counterparts (x86-64) which made it easier for developers to go multi-platform, even for indies. The next generation seems to keep pushing in this direction, but in a bigger way than before which is great for everyone down the chain. 

 

Optimization is the key word here. Each platform requires a different way to bring out it's 100% potential. The larger the platform (more users) the more time a developer will invest in time. If the platforms are similiar, some of these optimizations can be shared between platforms reducing the overall time needed.

PC is usually being criticized a lot for "bad portings" but people forget that a developer NEEDS to make it's game avaiable for a stupidly high amount of different configurations at any price points. Each "setting" that you toggle in the menu to reduce or increase the load on CPU, memory, GPU etc.. needs to be coded for. And it requires time. And often, it doesn't provide a benefit if not for a small fraction of users, so it's a waste of time. Consoles only have 1 configuration = 1 optimization cycle require. This is where the orange to apples differences usually come from.

[RejZoR]

1 hour ago, porina said:

I suppose in a way, this is "no new information" but does give us a little more confidence it will happen. If the world doesn't destroy itself before then.

 

I'd argue up to Skylake Intel were progressing. There were tangible IPC gains between architecture updates, and between them we had the process updates happening. We had a wobbly wheel with 14nm on Broadwell, but the real trouble started on 10nm and we got Kaby lake. Yes, since then we've not had an update to desktop architecture. Which is not to say they don't have updated architectures, like the Sunny Cove out on mobile.

 

I did have to check as my recollection didn't place the 5700XT that high. In a quick look at Techspot it seems it still loses more often than not to a 2070S. 5700XT's main win was the lower price when it came out.

 

 

Overall it will be exciting to see what AMD can bring to the GPU area, and see how high they can go. I do hope they can clearly exceed a 2080Ti, which will have been out for about 2 years when big navi launches. Actually I probably need to clarify there. I hope big navi will beat a 2080Ti when running non-RT games. I would hope it smashes current RTX cards in that area, along with nvidia next gen RTX getting a decent performance uplift in that area specifically.

Depends on resolution I guess. I was mostly checking 1080p which is most relevant to me (1080p but at 144Hz) and it was mostly trading blows with GTX 1080Ti. In some games losing a bit and in some actually beating it by quite a lot. But all in all, it's a good product. At least hardware wise. People seem to complain a lot over software tho. Up till HD7950 which was my last Radeon, I never really had issues with it. Did it really get this much worse after that?

[jasonvp]

2 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

For the love of god AMD, actually try this time. Don't just offer budget shit. Actually give me something to challenge this 1080ti.

That's the wrong target for AMD to be shooting at, of course.  Pascal is 4+ years old at this point.  In fact, AMD shouldn't be shooting for Turing, either.  They need to guess where NVidia is going to be with the release of Ampere and target a point beyond that.  This is the thing AMD continues to fail at doing with their GPUs, and there's no hint that will change any time soon.

[porina]

10 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Depends on resolution I guess. I was mostly checking 1080p which is most relevant to me (1080p but at 144Hz) and it was mostly trading blows with GTX 1080Ti. In some games losing a bit and in some actually beating it by quite a lot. But all in all, it's a good product. At least hardware wise. People seem to complain a lot over software tho. Up till HD7950 which was my last Radeon, I never really had issues with it. Did it really get this much worse after that?

Techspot results were for 1440p and 4k. https://www.techspot.com/review/1902-geforce-rtx-2070-super-vs-radeon-5700-xt/

AMD slides around the time of launch were pitching the 5700 series as the best 1440p cards. I think they were targeting the 5600 series as best cards for 1080p.

 

At 1080p, the CPU becomes more dominant than the GPU (depending on title, settings, etc.) and the gap closes. Also there will always be titles that work better on one or the other manufacturer cards.

[HumdrumPenguin]

Who does even get excited from Intel cpus these days? The way things are going, my current cpu may end up being the last Intel I'll have in a good while.

[Dabombinable]

This has just made me fully realise just how old the current consoles are...

[PriitM]

Finally, a worthy GPU to replace my R9 390X (the die is 483mm2). Reported the Big Navi will have 500+mm2. I say the age old wisdom: no replacement for displacement. I just hope the MSRP wont be much over 500 dollars...

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, CarlBar said:

I'm not exactly super familiar with older console specs but i was under the impression there were some pretty significant differences in how they worked making it somthing of an apples to oranges comparison anyway.

It was mostly the GPU tech that was old, typically based on an outgoing architecture or one that has already been replaced but due to design lead times etc not able to use the newer one. PS3 for example was released in Nov 2006 and used Nvidia G70/NV47 (7800 series) architecture, which by then Nvidia had already refreshed with 7900 series but just days earlier released G80 (Tesla) 8000 series which was a good bit faster and supports DX10 and Shader Model 4.0.

 

CPU wise they tended to be IBM special sauce type stuff but GPUs were spit polished old stuff or middle of the road, nothing notable about them at all.

[leadeater]

19 minutes ago, PriitM said:

Finally, a worthy GPU to replace my R9 390X (the die is 483mm2). Reported the Big Navi will have 500+mm2. I say the age old wisdom: no replacement for displacement. I just hope the MSRP wont be much over 500 dollars...

GPU forced induction?

 

Spoiler

 

[RejZoR]

37 minutes ago, HumdrumPenguin said:

Who does even get excited from Intel cpus these days? The way things are going, my current cpu may end up being the last Intel I'll have in a good while.

The 10th gen is actually not as much of a stinker as we all thought it would be. It's still far from something I'd be super thrilled about, but if you're a gamer and gamer primarily, I can see someone be excited. But it's not that same thrill as with AMD where they just churn out shit and with every release we're more and more amazed over their products. Intel was like that too. Once. Quite some time in the past...

[Trik'Stari]

1 hour ago, jasonvp said:

That's the wrong target for AMD to be shooting at, of course.  Pascal is 4+ years old at this point.  In fact, AMD shouldn't be shooting for Turing, either.  They need to guess where NVidia is going to be with the release of Ampere and target a point beyond that.  This is the thing AMD continues to fail at doing with their GPUs, and there's no hint that will change any time soon.

The point being that they need to actually try to reach for the high end, not just "best price to performance! hurrr durrr!" that they've been doing.

[jasonvp]

2 minutes ago, Trik'Stari said:

The point being that they need to actually try to reach for the high end, not just "best price to performance! hurrr durrr!" that they've been doing.

I understand that.  The point is: they don't need to reach today's high end, they need to exceed tomorrow's.  You're 1080Ti isn't even remotely "today's high end", either.

 

[Tech Enthusiast]

I am praying for this release to rock and competition to return to GPUs.

Not as crazy as they wipe the floor with Intel right now (because that only means reversed roles), but they need to hit NVidia with a solid product for once.

 

Sadly, my expectations are slim for now. 

AMD always overpromises on their GPU segment. They keep touting how great their next product will be and what we get is mostly "okish", but certainly not great and only competitive in segments NVidia allows them to be.