With NVIDIA making waves by announcing the 3070, 3080 and 3090 (as well as buying ARM), the impetus is now on AMD to announce its counterattack in the PC gaming market.
It’s been confirmed for months that AMD's ‘RDNA2’ architecture is a part of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, and fans have also been told to expect a big reveal event on October 28 for AMD's 6000 series graphics cards, also known as Big Navi.
But the party has started early, with a bizarre Fortnite event pre-emptively revealing AMD Radeon RX 6000 series, which AMD mentioned on Twitter like so...
A Twitter user called NateOrb was quick to react, heading to Fortnite Creative Island and putting in the code from AMD's Tweet. This is what they encountered as a result...
Pretty cool, right? If a bit odd. It's nice of AMD to give us an early look at what's in the pipeline, although there is still a lot we don't know about the 6000 series.
Which is why the event for October is one to watch out for. AMD has explicitly stated that it will unveil the 6000 Series, alongside new Ryzen CPU products, next month.
Table of Contents
READ MORE: AMD Ryzen 5 5900X ANNOUNCED with huge gains from Zen 2!
With that, here’s what we know so far, and what we hope to see at the event...
Radeon RX 6000 reveal event
Just as the cancellation of E3 amid the Covid-19 pandemic led to the likes of Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and EA restructuring their marketing plans for Summer 2020, AMD has had to adjust to these changes.
Following the AMD event in early October, that revealed the Zen 3 gaming core, AMD will host another event on October 28 focusing on the RX 6000 graphics cards (known affectionately Big Navi).
The event will take place at 9 AM PT/12 PM ET/4 PM GMT, and can be viewed from AMD's YouTube channel or their official website.
If you still haven't seen the previous AMD event from October 8, you can view it here:
Specs
Only fifteen months ago, the 5000 series of graphics cards announced by AMD. Touting better performance against cheaper prices over NVIDIA at the time, they’ve become fantastic cards to have when games are running the ‘Vulcan’ API graphics.
As expected, these new cards will have the ‘RDNA2’ architecture, so expect ray-tracing this time, alongside a ‘50% performance improvement over RDNA’ as AMD have stated.
During the October 8 AMD event, AMD teased the Big Navi card, showing off how the graphics card performs in 4K. According to AMD, its latest card can run Borderlands 3 at 62 FPS, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare at 88FPS, and Gears 5 at 73 FPS. Pretty impressive stuff.
If you want to see some examples, you only need to look at the announcements that Sony and Microsoft have made for their games. This is all reflective of the GPU power that RDNA2 will offer.
READ MORE:AMD BIG Navi Release; When could it be?
List of SKU
Last July, AMD announced the beginning of the RDNA line with the 5700XT, but up until now, there have been other products to better differentiate for low, medium and high-demanding PC players.
With that, here’s what we think we could be seeing next month:
- 6700XT
- 6600
- 6500
Making it simple; a high-range, medium-range, and low-range card. But it does raise the question after the fantastic pricing of NVIDIA’s 30 Series of how much they will be.
AMD actually began this trend with, not only the 5000 Series, but their Ryzen chips too. They undercut the price of Intel by a significant margin, while offering a lot more performance per watt.
Currently, if you were to buy a 5700XT now, it would be around the £369.99 range. Expect to pay around the same for the 6700XT, and then differences of £75 by the lower-range cards.
READ MORE: Best Graphics Cards available to buy right now.
Release date
We are just two days away from the October 28 event, and while there're no rumours on the release dates for the 6000 series, it would be best to approximate one from last year’s cards.
July 2019 was when the 5700XT launched, alongside October, December and January for the less-expensive cards. But this time is slightly different; the architecture is being used in the two consoles from Sony and Microsoft, so it would make sense to see them released after the launch.
It’s rumoured that there is an agreement that the 6000 series cannot launch until after the November launch of both consoles, so perhaps the end of November may be when the 6700XT launches.
READ MORE: AMD reveals Zen 3: Next-gen PC gaming core explained
Price
As for price, your guess is as good as ours right now. But looking at what NVIDIA is doing could provide a clue or two.
NVIDIA's lower-end 3070 price starts at $499 USD, while the higher-end 3090 price starts at $1499 USD.
We'd assume that AMD wants to cover a similar range of prices, but only time will tell if the 6000 Series ends up coming in higher or lower than NVIDIA's offering.
READ MORE:NVIDIA 3070 RTX Explained!
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