AMD confirms the graphics architecture Navi for the third quarter of 2019

With the Zen architecture, AMD is back on the map among performance hunters, who are now looking forward to the Ryzen 3000 series. At the same time, the company is fighting headwinds in the graphics card market, where Nvidia has had a clear advantage in terms of both performance and energy efficiency for the past three years.

The next graphics architecture from AMD is called Navi and is manufactured similarly to Vega 20, which is the basis for the Radeon VII graphics card, on TSMC’s 7-nanometer technology. When exactly this will be released has been a topic for many speculations, where the only thing that has actually been confirmed is that it will take place before the end of the year.

Navi is a new architecture for us in gaming. It has a lot of new features across the Navi architecture. Things are progressing well, we expect it to launch in the third quarter.

In connection with AMD’s latest quarterly report, the company’s CEO Lisa Su confirms that the launch of Navi will take place during the third quarter of the year, ie sometime during the period July – September. It is worth mentioning that Navi is the code name for an entire family of graphics cards and probably more than one graphics circuit.

And then in terms of ray tracing again we will talk more about our overall Navi roadmap as we get closer to the launch.

The only thing that is confirmed about the architecture is that it receives support ray tracing, something Sony system architect Mark Cerny revealed when he gave the first details for the next generation Playstation. However, this is not something that has been confirmed for the first Navi-based graphics cards and during the conversation Lisa Su chose not to give any concrete information about this.

From a positioning stand-point, I probably won’t go through it in great detail right now, other than to say that it is 7 nanometre Navi but it will be positioned below where for example our Radeon VII is positioned today from a price-point stand-point.

Another interesting detail that appears and also confirms previous information is that the new graphics cards with the architecture Navi will cost less Radeon VII. The latter currently has a recommended price of USD 699 or around SEK 7,990 in Swedish stores and is intended to compete with Geforce RTX 2080.

Not aiming for the performance segment is reminiscent of the launch of the Polaris family in the summer of 2016, when AMD developed two relatively small graphics circuits and had recommended prices of up to $ 239. It is worth mentioning that this may be an initial strategy from AMD, as information is circulating about a larger graphics circuit for the top performance at the beginning of 2020.

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