The day before, we told you about the introduction of Navi 20 and how it uses ray tracing technology. And now we’re adding more details about the performance it could have had and the backgrounds of the scenes on Navi, Vega and Raja Koduri.
AMD Navi 20 Ray Tracing will surpass Nvidia’s high end?
According to the details, prior to leaving the company, Raja Koduri resigned from AMD Radeon Technologies Group, where he was responsible for addressing many of GCN’s architectural weaknesses. Reason for this was that RTG could focus on both areas to develop a next-generation architecture and work on GCN’s iterations to remain competitive with NVIDIA’s GeForce and Quadro product lines. Now we’ve seen that this strategy worked well for AMD in the mainstream market, but its main products didn’t really work well compared to NVIDIA’s high-end products.
When Raja joined RTG, the design of the Vega GPU was almost complete and there was little to do, so Vega didn’t live up to expectations. Raja’s real goal was to work on Navi GPUs that would continue to build on the existing GCN architecture, while being refined through corrections such as the geometry engine, as reported by RedGamingTech. It is now possible and very likely that AMD would have completed the design for Navi long before Raja left RTG. One thing that will happen to Navi when it enters the development phase is that we are very close to it now, as rumors indicate the launch of the first Navi-based Radeon RX cards in mid-2019.
As for the performance of Navi 20, it is said that the estimates for Ray Tracing are very good and that the GPU may end up being competitive or even faster than competing GeForce RTX cards, indicating the performance of the RTX 2080 Ti. It is also claimed that HPC or data center cards based on the Navi GPU architecture would differ greatly from consumer parts. They will probably have a more custom SOC-oriented design, similar to what NVIDIA does with its high-end Tesla parts.
The launch of Navi 20 is planned for 2020, this year AMD plans to launch the first Navi 10 graphics cards for the mid-range market. This also means that it will take 1.5 to 2 years for AMD to have products that can compete at eye level with NVIDIA’s high-end series.