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AMD Navi GPUs will be launched in 2019. According to AMD, they could also compete against Nvidia Turing again in the high-end segment.

Navi is the hope for the future

The graphics card market is currently somewhat bogged down. While Nvidia has released a new generation with Turing, the increase in performance in favor of raytracing has remained moderate. What has increased significantly, however, are the prices. Nvidia is charging a lot for the RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. This only works because no competition in the form of AMD is expected in the foreseeable future. The company only poses a threat to Nvidia in the mid-range segment with the RX 590. Even the RX Vega 64 is not uninteresting at a low price, but simply can’t keep up with the RTX 2070.

The next graphics card to be released by AMD will be codenamed Navi. It is the hope for the company. A leaked version called Navi 12 could be launched in the first half of 2019, but will only serve the mainstream market. The actual release of the full version of Navi is scheduled for the second half of 2019. For months there have been rumours that AMD generally only wants to serve the mainstream market with Navi. The graphics card would be as fast as the GTX 1080 at the price of a RX 580. But since AMD is already designing the new architecture for the 7nm structure width, the potential would be almost wasted. Navi could therefore very well be faster than an RTX 2080. AMD itself now also indicates this.

AMD Navi should play in the high-end range

Since the RX Vega generation, the scepticism about AMD’s statements before the release of new graphics architectures has increased significantly. Before the presentation of RX Vega, the company has indicated several times that it will also play a role in the absolute high-end sector, at that time in the form of the GTX 1080 Ti and Titan Xp respectively. The release then showed that it was only enough for the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070.

However, with Navi the situation is now somewhat different. The majority here assumes that they will only get a mainstream graphics card. Dave James from PCGamesN has spoken with David Wang, Senior Vice President of the Radeon Technology Group, back at Computex 2018. The AMD manager talked about how exciting he found it in the days when AMD and Nvidia were fighting each other in the high-end sector. When asked whether the goal with Navi was to return to the high-end battle with Nvidia, he promptly agreed.

Also in earlier interviews with AMD CEO Lisa Su there were already promises that the company would again be a competitor for Nvidia in the high-end sector. At the last Credit Suisse event, Lisa Su spoke once again about AMD’s high-end future.

We will be very competitive overall and that includes the high-end of the GPU market. Obviously, there are some new products out there from our competition. We will have our set of new products as well and we’ll be right there in the mix. – Dr Lisa Su, AMD CEO

Does this also include the customer market?

Whether Lisa Su’s statement also includes the end customer market is much more difficult to determine. It is also possible that Lisa Su’s statement only indicates that AMD will once again be competitive in the server and professional segments of the high-end market. With the Radeon Instinct MI60 AMD has already released a strong Vega 20-based graphics card with 7nm for the server market. And the professional graphics cards normally go hand in hand with the consumer graphics cards. Lisa Su also definitely mentions “new products from our competition” in her statement, by which actually only Nvidia’s Turing graphics cards can be meant. It is therefore quite possible that AMD will also serve the high-end market with Navi. But time will tell whether this will happen. So don’t rely too much on it, as the debacle with RX Vega has shown.