Expect AMD’s High End GPU To Appear At E3

AMD’s not really offered a proper competitor to Nvidia’s high-end GPUs to date. But in a new interview, AMD’s CEO is setting expectations supremely high.

Despite how well AMD are doing on the CPU front, the company’s struggled to really make waves with their desktop GPUs. The company’s made a lot of plays at mainstream and esports-level gaming rigs, but despite talking about supporting real-time ray tracing in the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, there’s been no word of when that support might reach the Radeon GPU line.

But while CEO Dr Lisa Su told AMD’s interview that this year would be huge for “laptops” – an indication that successors to the Ryzen 3000 desktop CPUs probably won’t arrive until 2021 – the company would start talking about what’s been dubbed “Big Navi”. “Big Navi” is basically nomenclature for a GPU designed to rival Nvidia’s RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti offerings. And after telling a roundtable at CES that “the discrete graphics market, especially at the high end, is very important to us”, the AMD CEO has confirmed that the company will ship a product this year to compete in that space.

So the question is: why E3? Dr Lisa Su didn’t confirm the timing of the product, and nobody at AMD has made any allusion to when Big Navi might hit the floor. But AMD’s timing has been impeccable over the last few years. Ever since the launch of the first generation Ryzen processors, AMD has always used their sponsorship of E3 – and the PC Gaming Show – to highlight their GPUs. Media has been flown out to separate tech days for the launch of Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs, and sometimes that’s included Radeon hardware, but AMD has always used E3 to highlight their graphics division and the developers working with AMD gear (like Ubisoft and the Ghost Recon: Breakpoint team, or Gearbox and Borderlands 3 last year).

[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/06/everything-amd-announced-at-e3-2019/” thumb=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/06/2019-06-11_091823-410×231.jpg” title=”Everything AMD Announced At E3 2019″ excerpt=”New partnerships, a Navi GPU, some games on new hardware and a view to the future. AMD’s been talking up high frame rates and low latencies for a while, and at E3 they finally announced what tech they have that might power that.”]

So Big Navi is coming. Will it be a proper rival to the RTX 2080 Ti? Will it even hold a candle to the next generation of RTX cards from Nvidia, which are starting to emerge? Nobody knows yet. But it should at least bring prices down on existing GPUs, particularly in Australia, and that is always a good thing.


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