Here’s everything we know about AMD RDNA 2. AMD Navi has been out for nearly a year, but what about the 4K-ready Big Navi?
It’s official. AMD RDNA 2 will rise up on October 28, following the release of Nvidia’s competing Nvidia Ampere graphics cards. And after months of speculation and leaks about the next generation graphics cards, AMD CEO Lisa Su took the stage at the Ryzen 5000 launch to give users a sneak peek of what the Radeon RX 6000 series will be able to do. Thanks to the triumphant success of AMD Navi, led by the Radeon RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 GPUs, people have had a taste of AMD’s mid-range champions. And now, they’re hungry for ‘Big Navi’. It’s highly likely that this upcoming AMD graphics card is set to dethrone the reigning champ, RTX 2080 Ti. This is supported by a more recent report from Coreteks that asserts AMD’s flagship graphics card will offer performance on par with the Nvidia RTX GeForce 2080 Ti and will be launched as a rival to the Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3080. AMD RDNA 2 will be the graphics architecture behind both the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5, as well, supporting all the next-generation features like variable rate shading and ray tracing – even though there’s been a rumor that ray tracing support won’t be there all the way down the product stack. It seems like AMD Big Navi release date rumors have been everywhere since the very beginning of time – or at least since Navi rumors first started appearing in late 2018. Initially, we had heard that Big Navi would be launching at Computex – but Computex didn’t even happen. Days after Nvidia’s announcement of the RTX 3080 however, AMD teased the launch of both its Zen 3 desktop processors and RDNA 2 graphics cards, with the latter expected to come in right before Halloween on October 28 – just a couple weeks before the November 10 launch of the Xbox Series X that the graphics architecture will be powering.
