04-18-2019, 12:59 AM
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/28965...eat-nvidia
Quote:None of this is in conflict with the earlier information leak, but the next bit of information suggests that Navi will target Vega 56 / GTX 1080 performance as opposed to the GTX 1080 / RTX 2070 — and that is new. It’s also not great news if you’re hoping AMD will deliver a devastating blow to Nvidia’s RTX family.
...
If the earlier leak is true, of course, Navi would be truly gunning for the stars. A $250 GPU competing against a $500 GPU would punch gaping holes in Nvidia’s price brackets and product banding.
The biggest reason to think AMD would take a step like this is the company’s own weak position in the GPU market. AMD may own most of the console space, but it’s been all-but driven out of the high-end desktop and laptop markets. Coming out of the gate swinging could help it win back mind share.
The biggest reason to think they won’t? Let’s be honest. In the nearly six years since Hawaii launched, AMD’s competitive track record in graphics hasn’t been all that great. Hawaii was a great competitor but had volume issues that weren’t resolved until third-party cooler designs were available. Fury X had an issue with glue in its water cooler and couldn’t cleanly beat the GTX 980 Ti.
...
This is not to say that I’m preemptively judging Navi to be a failure. A $250 Vega 56 or GTX 1080-equivalent would be a huge performance jump over AMD’s current silicon in a fraction of the power. We don’t know what the ray tracing situation is yet, because we don’t know if the Navi silicon Sony is using in 2020 is identical to the Navi silicon AMD is bringing to market in 2019. AMD has, thus far, been very quiet about ray tracing except to say that they didn’t expect to introduce the feature until they could do it, top-to-bottom. This could imply that they are holding back the capability for a future GPU launch, possibly aligned to the PS5’s formal debut. There are also rumors of different flavors of Navi and different performance targets debuting up and down the stack, with some arriving in 2020. Alternately, these could belong to Arcturus, Navi’s supposed successor.
Gamers who have been calling for AMD to deliver a “Ryzen” level leap in gaming performance aren’t wrong; the company needs one. While the company still maintains performance against Nvidia in some price bands, it now draws nearly 2x the power to do it. That’s an ugly, unsustainable position to be in. Will Navi be the architecture to turn it all around? Hopefully, yes — but we’ve been waiting for a proper Hawaii follow-up for six years now. 4chan isn’t exactly a reliable data source. Then again, AMD’s past six years of GPU deliveries haven’t been all that strong, either.