Rumor: AMD to unveil next-gen RDNA 2 GPU with ray tracing support at CES 2020

[Polycount]

PC gamers have been eagerly awaiting AMD's response to Nvidia's RTX series GPUs. The Red Team did receive the Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT cards, which are both fantastic values for their respective costs, but they lack any form of ray tracing (like all of AMD's other GPUs). This lack of specific competition has effectively allowed Nvidia to dominate this side of the market and set its own rules (and outlandish prices).

Fortunately, things could be about to change if recent rumors prove accurate. Chiphell leaker Wjm47196 claims to have inside information on AMD's upcoming Radeon hardware products.

Wjm47196's Chiphell posts are in Chinese, but WCCFTech has broken things down nicely. According to the outlet and the leaker, AMD plans to preview its upcoming RDNA 2 GPU line-up at CES next year, and -- among other features -- the cards are expected to have hardware-accelerated ray tracing functionality and improved power efficiency.

They'll run on an "optimized" 7nm+ process node, and AMD wants the line-up to include "enthusiast-grade" desktop graphics options. It remains to be seen how competitive or compelling these offerings will be for high-end hardware fans, of course.

If you're wondering why Wjm47196's claims should be taken seriously at all, you need only look at the individual's track record. They've consistently provided accurate leaks about other AMD products in the past, including the Radeon VII, and the RX 590. With that said, all rumors should be viewed with some degree of skepticism until they're completely proven.

Fortunately, we won't have to wait long to find out what AMD has up its sleeve. CES 2020 is just a couple months away (it runs from January 7-10), so stay tuned for our coverage. We will reach out to AMD for comment on this story, but we do not expect to receive a response.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/82822-rumor-amd-unveil-next-gen-rdna-2-gpus.html

 

[Adi6293]

Sometimes I hate being a PC enthusiasts, I only just ordered a full cover block for my Radeon VII and considering how close 5700XT is to VII big Navi with crush my card :-( spending never ends ;-P

 

[Irata]

Charlie also posted an article that a new high end GPU just taped out for release in 2020, so that may be it (article is behind a paywall, so I do not know the details).

For me personally the „improved power efficiency“ part is interesting as that will eventually trickle down. Let‘s see what else there is.

 

[grumblguts]

From my observations when comparing the two for the first time with any kind of ray tracing their results look very different.
Is AMD failing to take into consideration rain drops effecting the water surface hence no shimmering on the ray traced reflection or is AMD doing ray tracing better than nvidia and not fluctuating when it should.
I honestly do not know.
https://streamable.com/6mjxo

 

[Evernessince]

Seems very early for AMD to be announcing RDNA2 unless it is just a refresh. The 5700 and 5700 XT were just launched in july not even half a year ago.

 

[yRaz]

From my observations when comparing the two for the first time with any kind of ray tracing their results look very different.
Is AMD failing to take into consideration rain drops effecting the water surface hence no shimmering on the ray traced reflection or is AMD doing ray tracing better than nvidia and not fluctuating when it should.
I honestly do not know.
https://streamable.com/6mjxo

I don't know how to interpret your comment. I've been gaming since 1993 and the last thing I think about is graphical effects. If a games core elements are garbage I won't be woo'd by pretty lights.

 

[krizby]

Nice that AMD postpone their big Navi until their Ray Trace hardware is ready to be incorporated. No one want a high end GPU that is going to be obsolete within a year (Radeon VII).

 

[Puiu]

I don't know how to interpret your comment. I've been gaming since 1993 and the last thing I think about is graphical effects. If a games core elements are garbage I won't be woo'd by pretty lights.

But when both are good then yes, you'll definitely be "woo'd".

 

[GeforcerFX]

Seems very early for AMD to be announcing RDNA2 unless it is just a refresh. The 5700 and 5700 XT were just launched in july not even half a year ago.

Or it's the replacement for the Vega family (Vega 56, 64 and VII) and designed to compete against the gtx 80 cards. Vegas came a long after the mainstream polaris, 5700 and 5700XT are partial mainstream replacements.

 

[Evernessince]

Or it's the replacement for the Vega family (Vega 56, 64 and VII) and designed to compete against the gtx 80 cards. Vegas came a long after the mainstream polaris, 5700 and 5700XT are partial mainstream replacements.

High end Navi is definitely possible but it also doesn't answer what exactly qualifies this as RDNA2, which suggests major improvements to the architecture.

 

[m3tavision]

Nice that AMD postpone their big Navi until their Ray Trace hardware is ready to be incorporated. No one want a high end GPU that is going to be obsolete within a year (Radeon VII).

AMD didn't postpone anything... you are trying to spread FUD again..

Don't forget, that AMD came out with one 7nm 252mm^2 GPU Navi10 chip that caused Nvidia to come out with 3 new GPU's to compete with it. Now AMD has released their 153mm^2 navi14 that caused Nvidia to release even more 1600 cards...

AMD can't keep enough rDNA chips on the shelves, so they products are highly sought after. AMD has no reason to rush things like Nvidia, only to be the first with a broken RTX experience. That does nothing but leave people angry... like Jensen did.

Secondly, if rDNA was better than Turing, then rDNA2 will be far out ahead of Turing. Subsequently, the Radeon VII was only sold for 7 months and went EOL when 5700XTX came out. Because rDNA is better than GCN too.

Lastly, Big Navi (345mm^2 ?) will be AMD's 4th 7mn GPU.... and we are still 10 month away from seeing a 7nm GPU from Nvidia for gamers.

 

[jgraham11]

If AMDs implementation of Ray Tracing is better than Nvidia's they should be fine. If its close to the performance hit that RTX cards get when running Ray tracing vs not, it will leave AMD customers in the same boat as Nvidia's customers thinking: "Wow this sucks", ei Battlefield...

Why do you think Nvidia is remastering old titles: because that's what Nvidia's ray tracing implementation can do well...

 

[krizby]

AMD didn't postpone anything... you are trying to spread FUD again..

Don't forget, that AMD came out with one 7nm 252mm^2 GPU Navi10 chip that caused Nvidia to come out with 3 new GPU's to compete with it. Now AMD has released their 153mm^2 navi14 that caused Nvidia to release even more 1600 cards...

AMD can't keep enough rDNA chips on the shelves, so they products are highly sought after. AMD has no reason to rush things like Nvidia, only to be the first with a broken RTX experience. That does nothing but leave people angry... like Jensen did.

Secondly, if rDNA was better than Turing, then rDNA2 will be far out ahead of Turing. Subsequently, the Radeon VII was only sold for 7 months and went EOL when 5700XTX came out. Because rDNA is better than GCN too.

Lastly, Big Navi (345mm^2 ?) will be AMD's 4th 7mn GPU.... and we are still 10 month away from seeing a 7nm GPU from Nvidia for gamers.

yes yes Navi is the best, Dr Lisa Su is best waifu, long live AMD, you happy now ?

 

[Theinsanegamer]

"This lack of specific competition has effectively allowed Nvidia to dominate this side of the market and set its own rules (and outlandish prices)."

The "specific" competition that was "lacking" (EG non existant) was performance. Nvidia didnt dominate thanks to RT, Nvidia dominated because AMD couldnt compete with any of their cards in ANY game. The 2070, 2080, and 2080ti were all untouchable by AMD for almost a year until the 5700xt finally came out, until then anything upper mid range or high end had only one choice: Nvidia.

RT, much like DX12, vulkan, mantle, trueaudio, HSA, APUs, ece will not save AMD. What will is good performance. Ryzen handily beat intel into the ground in performance tasks, and now continues that lead while getting very close in gaming benchmarks, that is why ryzen sells, not PCIE4, not because of some specification, because its performance is good.

The AMD GPU division needs to figure that out., The sales of the 5700xt, which doesnt have RT,s hould have been a good indicator that people want performance, and AMD stubbornly refuses to deliver. Even today, the 5700xt just BARELY catched the three year 1080ti in the best scenario. The 2080, super, and 2080ti remain unchallenged.

AMD, just release the 5800xt already! We know you can build it, you had a larger polaris chip for years, both the full die for consoles and the VII design. Stop holding them back for "features" and release a full generation of cards already! We know you are not afraid to cut a generation short to launch another one, so just give us what you can now instead of making consumers wait yet another year.

 

[gamerk2]

If AMDs implementation of Ray Tracing is better than Nvidia's they should be fine. If its close to the performance hit that RTX cards get when running Ray tracing vs not, it will leave AMD customers in the same boat as Nvidia's customers thinking: "Wow this sucks", ei Battlefield...

Why do you think Nvidia is remastering old titles: because that's what Nvidia's ray tracing implementation can do well...

All that's going to happen is the AMD/NVIDIA exclusive bits are going to get wrapped around some DirectX function that does essentially the same thing. This is no different then when NVIDIA and ATI came up with different Pixel Shader implementations, which got combined into Shader Model 2.0 as part of DirectX 9.

The root problem though is always going to be that the die space used for special hardware to accelerate ray tracing operations is *not* being used for other applications. So I'm not expecting any major performance jump over what's already available.

 

[gamerk2]

Waiting on HDMI 2.1 support so I can use my LG C9 to it's maximum potential. First GPU that supports it gets my money.

 

[Lounds]

Seems very early for AMD to be announcing RDNA2 unless it is just a refresh. The 5700 and 5700 XT were just launched in july not even half a year ago.

This reminds me of 10 years ago, I bought a ATI 4850 in October 2008, only for a year later the 5850 to come out offer 50+% performance increase in games.

 

[godrilla]

Sometimes I hate being a PC enthusiasts, I only just ordered a full cover block for my Radeon VII and considering how close 5700XT is to VII big Navi with crush my card :-( spending never ends ;-P

I hear you but the 2020-21 gpu wars are likely going to be the best we had in years. With rumors like Nvidia k!ller, 3080ti being cheaper than turing, and whatever Intel is doing ( at least putting pressure on the other two) seems like it's going to be great for the consumer. Hey there is always the ps5 and next Xbox if you want to jump ship.
Trust me we were all affected in past years with crypto mining price hikes and now rtx premium, thank goodness the enthusiast community stopped gpp from happening.

 

[yRaz]

But when both are good then yes, you'll definitely be "woo'd".

I would agree, but I haven't seen a game in the last few years worth buying. Last game I bought was fallout 4 and I was disappointed by that. Last game I bought that I actually loved was Bioshock infinite

 

[Markoni35]

If AMDs implementation of Ray Tracing is better than Nvidia's they should be fine. If its close to the performance hit that RTX cards get when running Ray tracing vs not, it will leave AMD customers in the same boat as Nvidia's customers thinking: "Wow this sucks", ei Battlefield...

Why do you think Nvidia is remastering old titles: because that's what Nvidia's ray tracing implementation can do well...

Ray tracing is one of the most demanding techniques of rendering. It's not easy to make a good implementation. What we see now is totally ridiculous. Graphics cars are nowhere near in power to deliver proper ray tracing. We need a quantum leap to make RT ("ray-tracing") truly RT ("real-time"). And by quantum leap I mean either quantum computers (which won't become mainstream anytime soon) or germanium-based chips, which can work at higher clock.

 

[Evernessince]

This reminds me of 10 years ago, I bought a ATI 4850 in October 2008, only for a year later the 5850 to come out offer 50+% performance increase in games.

I stuck with my 4850 until the 7000 series. The card was insane value.

 

[quadibloc]

Initially, of course, the reaction to Nvidia's ray tracing was that it added cost to its cards, without providing a useful feature. So now that more games feature ray tracing, it's perhaps become a more important feature to have.

What would be a better thing to do, if AMD could pull it off, is this: design the GPU to be more flexible, so it can perform better on GPU-based compute... and among the tasks made possible with this flexibility is ray-tracing. So that the cost of adding ray-tracing is minimal, and when ray-tracing isn't used, the resources it would use can instead be directed to conventional graphics processing.

 

[Puiu]

I would agree, but I haven't seen a game in the last few years worth buying. Last game I bought was fallout 4 and I was disappointed by that. Last game I bought that I actually loved was Bioshock infinite

Then at least try The Witcher 3. I won't bother you with the tens of games I liked this decade.

 

[Puiu]

Ray tracing is one of the most demanding techniques of rendering. It's not easy to make a good implementation. What we see now is totally ridiculous. Graphics cars are nowhere near in power to deliver proper ray tracing. We need a quantum leap to make RT ("ray-tracing") truly RT ("real-time"). And by quantum leap I mean either quantum computers (which won't become mainstream anytime soon) or germanium-based chips, which can work at higher clock.

Neah, ray-tracing can be done if you allocate enough resources. But that doesn't make it economically friendly for most gamers (think of it as adding a second large, expensive and specialised GPU just for this task). Gen 2 next year from Nvidia should be good enough to get good framerates for most simple applications. We still don't know what AMD is cooking up but it will prolly be something between what Nvidia has now and gen2 from them.

 

[yRaz]

Then at least try The Witcher 3. I won't bother you with the tens of games I liked this decade.

I forgot about that one, the Witcher 3 was both graphically awe inspiring and fantastic story wise. It also had a gameplay depth that was difficult for even an RPG veteran like me to wrap my head around.

It wasn't as open world and free as I would have liked, but, damn, if the story wasn't the greatest ive experienced since Freespace 2