It wasn't a great week for Nvidia, with the GeForce RTX 3080 by no means underwhelming, but it was almost impossible to get in stock, and several people had to rush out and get dented, unboxed cards. Others have been plagued with crashes on factory overclocked models, which is not an auspicious start.
Will AMD face the same problem with the upcoming Big Navi Radeon 6000 series GPUs? Wisely, no official statement has been released, but if Twitter chatter is any useful indicator, a lighthearted tweet from Frank Azor, the company's chief architect for gaming solutions, is worth a look.
It all started with a tweet from Twitter user Andre Elijah lamenting the unavailability of Nvidia cards. He ended the tweet with the words, "For $10, AMD will paper launch too."
Azor's response? He said, "Looking forward to receiving your $10.
Such confident tweets are certainly encouraging, but pride often comes before a fall. This is reminiscent of the situation where the PS5 went up for pre-order with no warning, causing predictable confusion and a full-on apology from Sony; Xbox's social media team took the opportunity to handle the situation a bit better by promising an "exact pre-order start time" in this tweet:
Despite prior warnings, the pre-order process was just as confusing as Sony's, and now Amazon is sending out emails that buyers may not get their consoles on the first day. The situation cannot be taken into account.
Speaking of next-generation consoles, AMD GPUs may play a unique role in their availability. Both systems will use AMD GPUs, which are based on the same architecture as the upcoming AMD Radeon 6000 series. So if AMD can meet that demand in addition to its own PC cards, perhaps the situation will become much more comfortable.
Expectations are high for Big Navi cards. These will be AMD's first GPUs to support ray tracing, and the early leaked specs look really promising, with performance comparable to the RTX 3080. If AMD can maintain its historically low prices, AMD could be a winner.
All will be revealed on October 28, when the company will unveil its new line of GPUs; if you are interested in AMD's Zen 3 CPU, it will be announced 20 days earlier, on October 10.
Comments