AMD has been on a roll during the past couple of months introducing a whole bunch of new hardware including their new industry-shaking Zen 2 CPUs and Navi GPUs. The new RDNA-based Navi GPUs that AMD has released so far are promising and offer some amazing value but are more tailored towards the mid-range market and thus, are not exactly the most powerful GPUs around. So, if you want something that is high-end and also supports raytracing (which is the talk of the town these days), you’d still have to go with an NVIDIA graphics card. However, it seems like that is about to change as AMD is finally ready to go head-to-head against NVIDIA again.
AMD Navi 23 with 2nd Gen RDNA Architecture and Ray Tracing Support
Apparently, AMD is working on a couple of new high-end Navi GPUs that would support ray tracing as well. The GPUs are known as the Navi 21 and Navi 23 according to reports, courtesy of RedGamingTech. The Navi 23, which is the flagship GPU is internally dubbed as the ‘NVIDIA Killer’ at AMD which is quite interesting and makes AMD’s intentions and ambitions quite clear.
Both of these GPUs are going to be based on the new 2nd Generation RDNA architecture and will be built upon the 7nm+ process node. This would give these two cards that much needed boost that AMD has always lacked to compete with NVIDIA at the top. AMD’s CEO has also confirmed that high-end flagship GPUs are being developed and we could see them out on the shelves as soon as mid-2020. The new GPUs will also move from GDDR6 memory to the newer HBM2E VRAM for a massive boost in memory bandwidth.
Can AMD really compete this time?
It would be interesting to see AMD’s take on ray tracing and how they deal with the massively demanding new tech. NVIDIA’s initial foray into ray tracing was not necessarily very smooth and it took them a few months to get to grips with efficiently optimizing ray tracing on their graphics cards. If AMD can pull that off from the get-go, it would give them a huge boost in terms of getting close to NVIDIA.
With Navi 23, AMD is hoping to take on the likes of RTX 2080 Ti. However, it should be considered that the Navi 23 doesn’t come out for another year and by that time, the 2080 Ti would be almost 2 years old. This means that NVIDIA could have some tricks up its sleeve by then and could bring out a refresh to the 2080 Ti, like it did with its latest RTX Super line-up of graphics cards. It would be an uphill climb for AMD to compete with NVIDIA on the high-end GPU market. However, with the momentum that the company has built up over the past couple of months, the odds of AMD actually pulling something like this off don’t look too unrealistic.