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AMD Navi 10 is supposed to be middle class only. The successor Navi 20 could be in the high-end range again due to major architectural change and raytracing.

Navi: middle class first, high-end second?

AMD currently has a massive problem in the dedicated graphics card market. With its GTX 16 series, Nvidia has again entered the actual main zone of the red team: the middle class. AMD simply doesn’t have anything up its sleeve against this at the moment. The next big innovation will be Navi. In the first generation, however, AMD could only play in the middle class. This is also indicated by the leaks to date. The biggest leak of December last year brought three models into the spotlight: the RX 3080, the RX 3070 and the RX 3060. The top model RX 3080 is supposed to reach the performance of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070, but only cost 250 US dollars. Among them follow the models RX 3070 and RX 3060, which are supposed to cost 229 and 179 US dollars respectively and compete against RTX 2070 and the GTX 16 series. Should this prove to be the case, AMD would again have a very good position in the mid-range segment.

What’s still missing are high-end graphics cards. In this area, the company currently only offers the Radeon VII, which with 16 GB of HBM2 memory is excellent for content creators, but in most games is defeated by the RTX 2080. AMD does not want to enter the high-end sector again until 2020. It’s also possible that Navi will be used – including a major architectural change and raytracing.

Navi 20 allegedly brings major architectural change and raytracing

Today’s leak or rumor comes from the YouTuber RedGamingTech. The YouTuber refers to reliable sources, which he does not mention in more detail. It is already about the generation that will follow Navi 10 and bear the name Navi 20. This is expected to come onto the market in 2020 and be able to compete with Nvidia again in the high-end segment. This would require fundamental changes in the GCN architecture to compensate for the disadvantages of Graphics Core Next. Also another important feature should come with Navi 20. AMD allegedly works on its own raytracing technique. The current raytracing performance is allegedly “extremely impressive”.

Meanwhile, the exact changes to the architecture that are to take place are still completely unknown. But since Navi 20 is also based on the GCN architecture, the changes can’t be that big. Only the successor of Navi is to be developed with a completely new architecture apart from GCN. Therefore, it is unlikely that AMD will integrate its own raytracing hardware into Navi 20, as Nvidia did with Turing. It would be more logical for the company to optimize compute performance to Microsoft’s DXR standard to enable raytracing effects. Whether the year 2020 is not already too late, time will have to tell. By then, Nvidia could have already switched to 7nm and bring even stronger graphics cards onto the market.

Launch of Navi 10 in July or at Gamescom

However, it will generally still take a very long time before the second generation of Navi comes onto the market. You should be accordingly careful with speculations and rumours. There could be a spark of truth in it, but you can never absolutely rely on it. In any case, this year the smaller offshoot of the Vega successor architecture will be the first. With Navi 10 AMD wants to recapture the mainstream market. When it will launch, however, can only be estimated at present. A launch on July the 7th together with the new Ryzen 3000 generation has already been discussed, but a launch at Gamescom 2019 in Cologne is also possible.