AMD Big Navi Won't beat Nvidia RTX3080 — here's Why

AMD Big Navi Won't beat Nvidia RTX3080 — here's Why

The AMD Big Navi has long been touted as the "Nvidia killer" graphics card. In leaked benchmarks, it appeared to do just that, offering 40-50% more performance than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Subsequently, Nvidia announced the GeForce RTX 3000 series.

According to YouTube channel Moore's Law is Dead, Big Navi will not kill the RTX 3080, the real successor to the RTX 2080 Ti. But it will come within "spitting distance" of AMD's $699 next-generation high-end graphics card.

This is at least in rasterization performance, which in layman's terms can be seen as standard graphics processing, while ray tracing, for example, is a more exotic rendering process. In other words, Big Navi will flatten the GeForce RTX 3070, a graphics card that offers better performance than the RTX 2080 Ti, for only $499. This is also the price of the Xbox Series X.

Moore's Law is Dead makes this judgment based on what to expect from Big Navi, also known as Navi 21, insider sources, and other AMD tidbits; TweakTown also reports that sources say that Big Navi is a pure rasterization performance, claiming that Big Navi will break the RTX 3080's heels in pure rasterization performance.

Big Navi will also include hardware-accelerated ray tracing. However, it will not be able to compete with the new Ampere architecture-based graphics cards, but will outperform current Turing-based GeForce GPUs. This bodes well for the ray-tracing performance of the PS5 and Xbox Series X, since both consoles will use the same RDNA 2-core graphics architecture as the Big Navi.

Moore's Law also predicts that Big Navi will be "more efficient at its originally intended clock than Ampere" and will not consume as much power as the RTX 3080 when the Navi 21 GPU is pushed harder. The YouTuber also believes that the Big Navi will not be as big as the larger RTX 3000 series graphics cards.

Thus, if AMD can deliver a powerful and efficient graphics card that can keep up with the RTX 3080 but undercut it in terms of price, it could be a winner. Also, if a powerful and inexpensive GPU that competes with the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 is introduced, Nvidia may be forced to lower the price of its Ampere graphics cards.

Big Navi is scheduled to be released on October 28, so we will find out reasonably soon what AMD has been working on and whether it can bring the heat to Nvidia.

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