AMD Navi graphics cards like the Radeon RX 5700 have been out for quite a while at this point, and while they definitely provide excellent performance for anyone looking for some 1080p or 1440p gaming, we’ve always wanted more.
That’s where RDNA 2, or Big Navi, comes in. We don’t know much about the next-generation AMD Radeon graphics architecture right now, beyond what rumors have been telling us for a while. But, at AMD’s Financial Analyst Day, we got a bit of a hint as to when we can expect AMD’s next graphics card – and it’s not exactly right around the corner.
Instead, in what shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, AMD is apparently targeting the end of 2020 for RDNA 2’s launch. We don’t have any specific launch date, of course, just that broad window. But, it does kind of make sense for AMD to launch RDNA 2 around November or December 2020, as that’s when we’re expecting the RDNA 2-powered Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 to launch.
This will likely be disappointing for anyone that was starting to buy into the hype of an imminent Big Navi launch, but there is good news. While we didn’t get any specific information about what kind of hardware these graphics cards will be packing, AMD did say that they would be 4K gaming cards with hardware-accelerated ray tracing. This could catch them up with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, but the real question is going to be whether or not Nvidia launches the RTX 3080 before then.
At the end of the day, we won’t know what’s going to happen until it, well, happens. What we do know is that AMD Big Navi is coming and that it’s coming this year. The rest we’ll figure out when AMD is ready to tell us.
