AMD’s Big Navi has been touted by the company as a genuine, high-end 4K gaming option for a while — but the company’s said supremely little about it all year. Finally, that’s about to change.
After letting Nvidia go through with their impressive RTX 30-series launch, AMD’s response is coming. The firm announced early this morning that they would have “big things on the horizon for PC gaming” on two dates: October 8 and October 28.
Join us on October 8 and October 28 to learn more about the big things on the horizon for PC gaming. pic.twitter.com/9dy8Lt5MP8
— AMD Gaming (@AMDGaming) September 9, 2020
AMD #RDNA2 architecture and Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards will bring the best of Radeon to gamers worldwide. Learn more October 28. pic.twitter.com/CZJRxTBe6m
— Radeon RX (@Radeon) September 9, 2020
The split dates mean that AMD is going to talk about Big Navi and their upcoming Zen 3 CPUs separately. The two products are in very different stages of their life: AMD has been clawing back mountains of goodwill and market share from Intel in the CPU market. They still lag behind Intel in gaming to a degree, but the price-to-performance ratio, and core counts, have caused AMD CPUs to become extremely popular over the last few years.
It’s likely that the Zen 3 launch will be desktop focused, since the Zen 2 mobile (Ryzen 4000 series) and desktop (Ryzen 3000 series and XT models) are out.
The bigger question is on the GPU side.
The Big Navi/RDNA 2 reveal won’t be until after the RTX 3090, 3080 and 3070 are available locally and internationally. That’s a huge window of opportunity for AMD to give people who might be on the fence about buying upgrades — and might also be less flush with cash in the midst of a global recession and pandemic. Asking gamers to hold onto their cash after Nvidia’s reveal, while not dropping any money on the upcoming Xbox and PlayStation 5, certainly carries some risk. And for those who have been waiting months for PC upgrades for big releases — namely Cyberpunk 2077 — the timing might be really difficult.
That aside, I’m looking forward to seeing what AMD’s GPU is actually capable of. We’ve been reminded of just how good competition can be, with CPUs in desktops and laptops now offering genuine, meaningful performance gains generation on generation. Plus, the value for money has gotten much better. Some more competition on the GPU side of things would be great — we’ll just have to wait until October 8 and 28 to see what AMD can deliver.
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