Representatives of Sapphire, which is one of AMD's key partners in the field of gaming graphics cards, revealed some details about the expected new products - video cards based on 7nm Navi GPUs. According to the announcements, the Navi generation GPUs will actually be previewed on May 27 during the opening speech of AMD CEO Lisa Su at Computex 2019, allowing card makers to openly showcase their upcoming products based on them at their booths. However, sales of video cards based on the new AMD GPUs will begin only after July 7th.
Such words were heard in an interview that Chinese portal zhihu.com took with a Sapphire product manager during regional festive events dedicated to the 50th anniversary of AMD.
In addition, prices were announced for two versions of Navi, which will be presented next week. The older graphics card, designed to compete with the GeForce RTX 2070, will receive a recommended price of $499, while the simpler Navi version, aimed at competing with the GeForce RTX 2060, will be priced at $399. Along the way, a Sapphire representative confirmed the absence of any functions for hardware acceleration of ray tracing among the Navi capabilities, which means that the expected AMD video cards will have to justify the rather high prices with a more convincing level of performance compared to similarly priced offerings from NVIDIA.
Together with this representative of Sapphire, the information about the existence of the βbig Naviβ project, a high-performance video card with about 5120 shader processors, rumors about which appeared some time ago, was refuted. This means that Radeon VII will remain the flagship in the AMD video card lineup in the second half of this year, and among the new generation offers, we should expect exclusively lower-class products based on Navi 10 and Navi 12 processors.
In a conversation, a Sapphire employee also managed to promise that the company will definitely release liquid-cooled Toxic series video cards based on Navi GPUs. At the same time, Sapphire has no plans to create its own version of Radeon VII with a non-reference design.
Source: 3dnews.ru