Last week, Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang invited us into his kitchen stocked with many spatulas and a few graphics cards.
There’s no denying that the RTX 30 series of graphics cards is exciting but as we moaned in last week’s Africast, the local pricing of these cards is monumental.
As such we’ve been waiting for AMD to issue a response to Nvidia and late on Wednesday even we received just that.
AMD #RDNA2 architecture and Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards will bring the best of Radeon to gamers worldwide. Learn more October 28. pic.twitter.com/CZJRxTBe6m
— Radeon RX (@Radeon) September 9, 2020
But we’re not just getting news about GPUs, the next generation of Ryzen chips is also being announced though that announcement is happening on 8th October.
So let’s break down these tweets starting with RDNA 2 / Big Navi / Navi X 2.
In truth we’re not all that surprised by this announcement. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S and X consoles will all be making use of this graphics architecture and PC builders have been waiting for word on equivalents in their market.
While we can’t comment on exactly what we can expect from these cards we suspect that performance and efficiency will be improved on from RDNA. Whether AMD can compete with the RTX improvements we saw from Nvidia last week with its Variable Rate Sharing will be interesting to see.
On to Ryzen announcement happening on 8th October.
With the next wave of AMD Ryzen processors and the all-new Zen 3 architecture, @AMD is taking its PC gaming and content creation leadership to new heights. Learn more October 8. pic.twitter.com/PAvA5m3FGo
— AMD Ryzen (@AMDRyzen) September 9, 2020
We’re definitely seeing Zen 3 then but in which form remains to be seen. AMD could pull an Intel and show off mobile chips before its bigger desktop CPUs but we think that’s unlikely.
Instead we suspect we’ll see Ryzen 4000 desktop CPUs. Something important to note is that while Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs exist, these are based on Zen 2 architecture and not Zen 3, confusing we know.
Perhaps AMD will have both mobile and desktop Zen 3 chips to show off but we won’t know until October.
With this in mind, it might be a good idea to hold on any upgrades.
With so much new tech coming at the end of the year, Holiday 2020 is looking to be a rather pricey festivity, and that’s before we consider all of the games we want to play as well.
Here’s hoping AMD’s trend of aggressively affordable pricing continues.
[Image – Ryzen 3000 CPU image on file]