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AMD’s next-gen Navi graphics cards may offer RTX 2070-like performance for $330

Jon Martindale
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Rumors about the capabilities of AMD’s Navi graphics cards are falling thick and fast as we edge closer to their expected E3 2019 reveal in June. The latest one gives us a speculative rundown at potential performance, suggesting that the flagship for the first line of Navi 10 and 12 GPUs could see AMD offer a card with performance around that of the RTX 2070 but at just $330, which isn’t far off half the price of Nvidia’s comparable GPU.

Much has been said about Navi over the past few years. After the difficulties AMD faced remaining relevant in the GPU market during the pricing explosion caused by cryptocurrency mining, AMD fans hope Navi will be the company’s next great generation of GPUs. These cards are not likely to be high-end solutions, with most expecting Navi 20 to fill that role in 2020, but if the latest rumors are anything to go by, they could be capable enough to offer stiff competition to a few of Nvidia’s powerful (but expensive) RTX Turing graphics cards.

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The latest speculation about Navi’s potential performance, power requirements, and pricing comes from an AdoredTV deep dive into a trove of publicly available information and anonymous sources.

Analysing Navi - Part 2

AdoredTV suggests that the specifications for the upcoming Navi graphics cards could be as follows, as WCCFTech summarized:

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Graphics card Compute units Performance comparison TDP Price
RX 3080 XT 56 RTX 2070 190w $330
RX 3080 52 Vega 64 + 10% 175w $280
RX 3070 XT 48 Vega 64 160w $250
RX 3070 40 Vega 56 130w $200
RX 3060 32 RX 580 75w $140

But all of these claims should be taken with a healthy dose of speculation, not just because they aren’t confirmed, but also because AdoredTV has received some other information about “Navi horror stories,” which suggested that AMD has been having difficulty hitting planned clock speeds for the new-gen cards. Another source claimed that Navi clocks were OK, but that the thermals and power weren’t ideal.

This runs counter to earlier claims that Navi performance was surprisingly strong and that AMD was pleased with how it was progressing.

It does seem like there’s serious potential for Navi to be great. Whether it actually will be, though, remains to be seen. We’ll need to wait until E3 to hear next from AMD and we won’t get our hands on these cards until sometime in the third quarter of 2019.

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Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale
Computing Coordinator
Jon Martindale is the Evergreen Coordinator for Computing, overseeing a team of writers addressing all the latest how to…
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