AMD Reportedly Prepping High-End Navi GPU Referred to Internally as “The NVIDIA Killer”

Tsing

The FPS Review
Staff member
Joined
May 6, 2019
Messages
11,075
Points
83
The Radeon Technology Group may have a secret weapon that could shift the balance of the GPU war. According to Red Gaming Tech (who claims to have leaked the release date for Ryzen 3000/Navi and the existence of 7 nm Vega for gamers, among other things), AMD is working on two high-end Navi cards, the Navi 21 and Navi 23.

The latter, more powerful variant is being referred to internally as "the NVIDIA killer." These will supposedly launch sometime next year, possibly with second-generation RDNA and ray tracing support. AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su is reportedly "growing frustrated for not having an answer to the higher-end NVIDIA SKUs."

Now, understand this wording from AMD isn’t typical internally, and to his knowledge, this kind of confidence wasn’t shown (internally at least), by AMD Engineers either for Vega or for even Polaris launch. It’s worth noting – that "NVIDIA Killer” is pretty vague, so it is very possible that this isn’t necessarily referring to raw performance, but possibly performance vs price too.
 
Fingers crossed, but this is two video card releases without an answer to the high end.
 
Next year....when Nvidia shows up with their new cards on 10/7nm. I don't see it killing anything except the previous gen again (2080Ti).
 
  • Like
Reactions: kin
Next year....when Nvidia shows up with their new cards on 10/7nm. I don't see it killing anything except the previous gen again (2080Ti).
Maybe some AMD engineers are thinking this will be like Epyc, which has leapfrogged all curren Intel's Xeon and even the next planned models of Xeon. But nVidia isn't Intel.
 
Maybe some AMD engineers are thinking this will be like Epyc, which has leapfrogged all curren Intel's Xeon and even the next planned models of Xeon. But nVidia isn't Intel.

Yeah that's the thing a lot of people seem to forget. Intel has been dicking around for like 8+ years now while Nvidia has just increased prices but continues to actually try to make better products.
 
Well, NVIDIA has always improved because it wants us continually upgrading our GPU's. Intel seems to think they can get us to do the same thing with incremental upgrades and forced platform obsolescence. While it works for some, there are plenty of people who ran or still do run Sandy Bridge systems after more than 7 years.

I'm one of those guys who upgrades fairly often, but I ran my Haswell-E based Core i7 5960X / X99 combination for almost five years. That's because I had no compelling reason to upgrade.
 
Last edited:
With Intel CPU's I've historically skipped a few generations between upgrades. Today I'm thinking... bonus time next year (if we get one) I'll be leaning toward building a new AMD 16 core solution for my user/gaming needs. But only time will tell. :)
 
Going to be real awkward during family gatherings if Lisa takes the GPU performance crown from her uncle.
 
Going to be real awkward during family gatherings if Lisa takes the GPU performance crown from her uncle.

I'm pretty sure that relatioship is made up. She mentioned it in one of her interviews, might have been with anandtech.
 
I'm pretty sure that relatioship is made up. She mentioned it in one of her interviews, might have been with anandtech.

I didn't know that (I can't remember where I originally read that they were related). If it was made up, I felt for it hook, line and sinker. :-/
 
Next year....when Nvidia shows up with their new cards on 10/7nm. I don't see it killing anything except the previous gen again (2080Ti).
Exactly what I was thinking. Nvidia should be getting a 20%-30% minimum performance increase next year. The new AMD cards will have to significantly faster than the 5700XT just to keep up, nevermind threaten the new high-end.
 
They have to do something to make the next PS and Xbox a decent upgrade from the previous gen, which CPU wise should be no problem with Ryzen but they do need to step it up in the GPU departement.

I was under the impression that there was a lot of manpower working on updated GPU's for the SOC's but that might have just been a rumour.
 
They have to do something to make the next PS and Xbox a decent upgrade from the previous gen, which CPU wise should be no problem with Ryzen but they do need to step it up in the GPU departement.

I was under the impression that there was a lot of manpower working on updated GPU's for the SOC's but that might have just been a rumour.


Before you read the following. Understand I WANT AMD to pull a rabbit out of the hat on this one.

AMD is smaller than Nvidia so in this case simply doesn't have the resources to throw at it. Perhaps they have some miracle working engineers. And full credit they shouldn't have been able to pull a rabbit out of the hat on Intel but here we are.

So my hope is that they indeed lead the market in CPU and Graphics cards at the same time. I mean that would TOTALLY rock for them.

It's going to take some real work to make that happen then to double down and hold on to it will be simply... amazing.

As a consumer we want both sides to be competitive at the high end as well. Because that is better for us!
 
this would be cool if they do indeed have their "Nvidia Killer"
 
Competition is good fellas, but we will see if it lives up to the hype

Exactly. Managing to catch up and match or even slightly surpass a rival that's had a decade of releasing products that can best be described as incremental upgrades over the previous generation for a decade is one thing. Catching a company that's been on top of its game, releasing product after product and increasing its lead for years is another thing entirely.

It's not impossible, but I'll remain somewhat skeptical until I see it.
 
I'll also elaborate that NV typically goes thru a 1-2 year cycle for their x80TI's and then it usually takes AMD 1-2 years to catch up to the previous x80TI.
 
They have to do something to make the next PS and Xbox a decent upgrade from the previous gen, which CPU wise should be no problem with Ryzen but they do need to step it up in the GPU departement.

I don't think it's on AMD to make the next console generation great again.

I think it's on the console manufacturer (Sony/MS/Nintendo).

AMD is offering up solutions to the manufacturers - but they are by no means bound to use it. In the end AMD is just going to follow whatever spec they are given.
 
Last edited:
Competition is good fellas, but we will see if it lives up to the hype

I totally agree. My complaint is that AMD always has two different sets of expectations to live up to:
The ones the marketing dept publishes, and the ones a lot of folks on the internet think AMD should do just because that's what they want.

To be fair, so does nVidia, but there it has less to do with performance and more to do with price.
 
Become a Patron!
Back
Top