Could AMD Big Navi Challenge Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 in the Marketplace?

AMD is having a moment and the company looks set to extend it if tech rumors are to be believed.

The graphics card arms race continues and it looks like AMD is about to shake up the current world order with its Big Navi high-end option. Some people even think that Big Navi’s stats put it in line to challenge Nvidia’s own GeForce RTX 3080 but, with only paper to back up that claim, we’ll take a wait-and-see approach on that.

So what makes Big Navi special?

While reports prior to an official launch are necessarily vague, what we can tell you with some certainty is that the Big Navi graphics card will be a pretty big leap over rival Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 ti. A lot of the specs for Big Navi are referenced in comparison to that card. YouTube channel Moore’s Law is Dead said, for example, that the GPU for Big Navi is 40 – 60 percent more powerful than the RTX 2080 ti. The source for this claim is “someone who hasn’t been wrong in the past” for whatever that is worth.

For reference, the (Founders Edition) GeForce RTX 2080 ti’s specs are as follows: GPU Architecture: Turing, RTX-OPS 78T, Boost Clock: 1635 MHz (OC), Frame Buffer: 11GB GDDR6, Memory Speed: 14 Gbps.        

And the entire basis for the claim is that the Big Navi’s performance eclipses the RTX 2080 ti in such a way that it is seemingly positioned right behind or on par with Nvidia’s next-gen graphics card.

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Could AMD Big Navi Challenge Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 in the Marketplace? 1

Multiple reports indicate that Big Navi will use AMD’s next-gen RDNA 2 graphics architecture and that we can expect to see it, as well as the RTX 3080 from Nvidia, this September. For what it is worth, the Nvidia graphics card will use the company’s new Ampere graphics technology.

Much of this caps off a year of pretty big wins for AMD. Both console titans Sony and Microsoft announced their next-gen consoles would be using RDNA-2 architecture. Naturally, that doesn’t mean much for the PC graphics card race. Given that both will be debuting around the same time, it will be interesting to see which company comes out on top.

What do you think? Does AMD’s Big Navi sound like something that could bring Nvidia down a peg or two or just more boastful marketing? Does it even matter? What graphics card would you choose if you had the option? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

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