Things are a rough for AMDs Radeon design team, talented employees walked over towards Intel leaving quite a bit of worry in the GPU front, especially the high-end segment. We know a die shrink 7nm VEGA is on the way, but other than that it's quiet at AMD in terms of high-end desktop graphics for consumers and PC gamers.

The fastest consumer high-end card (from AMD) right now is the Radeon RX Vega 64 and let's be totally honest, it is no match to what NVIDIA is currently offering in features and performance with the RTX range. So that raises questions as to where AMD is headed, and what the future plans are. In an interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su, mentions the intent that the company wants to be competitive again in the high-end GPU segment.

We will be “competitive in high-end graphics,” she said. “We’re making high-performing quality products and building a solid long-term foundation.”

Su also mentioned that the company created a "solid foundation for performance high-quality products", and explicitly mentions the market for high-end graphics. AMD aims to catch up with Nvidia in that segment much like what they are doing with Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs on the processor market. Lisa Su, however, does not mention when these high-end GPUs would actually arrive in the market and the answers feel more like a long-term strategy.

7nm VEGA is expected to launch in late Q4 2018 or Q1 2019, but we expect a release for the professional market only. Next in line is the Navi architecture should appear in the H1 of 2019 but that is a mainstream / mid-range market product series much to what Polaris offers right now. On Polaris, this chip will get respun as well, on 12nm in the upcoming weeks we expect to publish some reviews. The reality, however, remains that it is year 2016 GPU architecture simply moved towards a smaller fabrication node.





