New AMD GPU powering PS5 and Xbox Series X likely to be released before consoles

AMD CFO Devinder Kumar has recently announced at the Bank of America Securities Global Technology Conference that they are “on track to launch our next-generation Zen 3 CPUs and RDNA 2 GPUs in late 2020.” Stating also that the first RDNA 2 product to be launched will be the Navi 2 GPU, AKA the Big Navi.

When the PS5 and Xbox Series X launch later this year they will also use cards from the same family of GPUs, but not the Big Navi itself.

At the moment everything is pointing to the high-end graphics card being released in October of this year, and there are rumours of the GPU arriving in Linux drivers first.

Some specs

If you were wondering if this GPU will show us how the cards powering the PS5 and Xbox Series X will run, well the answer is yes and no as the Big Navi GPU will apparently be a lot more powerful.

The PS5 and Xbox Series X will need to use weaker, more customised RDNA 2 cards in order to keep their costing lower, therefore their specs probably won’t match the Big Navi 2. However, because they use the same rudimentary architecture, AMD’s launch will at least give us some idea of how RDNA 2 cards are built and how they may fit into next-gen hardware as a whole.

This GPU can’t come soon enough as its largest competitor the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti already graced us with its presence in October of 2018.

The Big Navi GPU will boast up to 80 CU/5120 GPU cores and up to 50% better performance per watt than anything in its class at the moment. Unfortunately, we haven’t been given a price yet but it is expected to be higher than the current RX 5700 XT graphics card as it will be twice as powerful.

The expected launch date for this innovative new GPU will be around October this year which happens to be the same window expected for the release of the Nvidia Ampere graphics card, which will most likely result in a head-to-head contest between these two GPUs.

Time will tell how this new graphics card will fare, but we are optimistic at the prospect of such a powerful GPU being available on the open market.

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