NVIDIA has no rival that can compete with the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti. AMD preferred to focus on the mid and low range of the market, with GPUs perfect for 1080p gaming, the resolution widely used by players today. In the high end, after the attempt made with Radeon VII, a very particular video card based on the "old" Vega architecture, the pursuit of AMD stopped. The American house, however, did not give up, the development of a high-end GPU based on Navi architecture has never stopped.
Now it looks like this card may have a name, Radeon 5950 XT, while the nickname has now become known among fans, thanks to AMD CEO Lisa Su, who has used it several times "Big Navi"to describe the new top of the range video card.
How will the RTX 2080 Ti rival be?
The new GPU under development by AMD is shrouded in mystery. We don't know when it will arrive but it is likely that we won't see her before the Taipei Computex next June. The information received so far is all the result of speculation, the secrecy is maximum in the AMD house. Big Navi should be the first GPU to take advantage of the new RDNA 2 microarchitecture, based on the 7 nm + production process. An evolution that will allow high clock frequencies even in the presence of a large number of Compute Units (CU), which seems to be one of the main features of the RX 5950 XT. The information leaked so far, all to be verified, in fact speak of 80 CU, for a total of 5120 Stream Processor.
The current Radeon RX 5700 XT, the most powerful Navi GPU available, uses 2560. The performance leap would be enormous, for an overall power that could reach 17.5 TFLOPs, higher than that of the RTX 2080 Ti, which stops at 14.5 TFLOPs. Being the RDNA 2 microarchitecture, it would also be integrated inside all the hardware to manage Ray Tracing.
Unfortunately, the information is still very uncertain, the leaked data is plausible but must be taken with the pliers, nobody really knows what AMD's goal is with Big Navi. The level of secrecy appears to be higher than normal, and for several reasons. On the one hand, competition with NVIDIA has become more severe, with each new AMD video card released in the last period, NVIDIA has hit back blow for blow, presenting new models or lowering the price of those already on the market.
It should also not be forgotten that the RDNA 2 microarchitecture should be that the basis of the next PS5 and Xbox Series X, whose hardware specifications are still shrouded in mystery today, one more reason to maintain the highest level of secrecy.
In short, Big Navi is in development, as well as the RDNA 2 microarchitecture, there is no doubt about this. In the meantime, however, NVIDIA will not stand by, the Ampere architecture promises well and its arrival in 2020 could further complicate the climb to the high end of AMD.
