Computex was unquestionably the AMD show this year, with the reveals and specs of the Ryzen 3000 line that looks like the company could absolutely crush competitor Intel in the desktop market. And that Computex keynote ended with a "Wait until E3 for Navi." Well that time has come, and now we finally have more details for the GPU line including products and pricing. But while the Ryzen processors threw a gigantic wrench into the CPU market, it looks like Navi won't have quite the same impact. Yet.
Meet the squad.
The first two products of the Navi architecture are the RX 5700 and the RX 5700 XT. The "XT" moniker seems to be AMD's take on Nvidia's "ti," though differentiates itself by having radder letters. For the uninitiated, Nvidia will have a product like a 1080 but also have a 1080 ti that's slightly better, but won't give it a new product name because of reasons. Anyways, the RX 5700 is launching at $379 to compete against Nvidia's roughly $350 RTX 2060. And while it offers a slight performance boost on the 2060, the slightly-lower-or-equal price is not exactly a head turner. The RX 5700 XT is a more XTreme option (huaehuae), competing against and topping Nvidia's $500+ RTX 2070 but coming in at $450. While this scenario was slightly more what AMD fanboys (such as myself) were hoping for, it's still somewhat of a mild move for the GPU market.
Wait, what?
But there's better cards than the competition for roughly the same price points. What's not to like? Well, a lot of this can be blamed on the torrent of rumors surrounding the Navi architecture overall. Since announcing its development, a lot of people were hoping, rather unrealistically, that we would get performance for about $100-$200 LESS than the Nvidia equivalent. A lot of this was pure speculation and pipe dreaming fueled by AMD's lack of information and people just hoping for an escape to the horrific GPU market. And coming right off the stellar announcement for the Ryzen 3000 CPUs, this whole affair feels like somewhat of a letdown. However, I'm choosing to approach it from a different angle: hope for the future.
So let's look back to the very first launch of Ryzen CPUs. While offering a great product stack for the price, the new Zen architecture didn't have a clear angle of topping Intel. The 2000 series and its Zen+ architecture inched closer, and gave AMD even more insight of how to really hone in and refine the node. By the third time around AMD had the 3000 series and Zen 2 and were in a firm position to finally say "Not only have we beat Intel in price-to-performance, but also in straight up performance." I'm foreseeing a similar move along the GPU line, as this initial launch of a new architecture is showing an awful lot of parallels to the initial Zen launch. Hopefully this time it won't take three generations for the red team to be able to come out on top for a significantly lower price point, as while Intel was nowhere close to a position where it could respond to Zen, you can bet Nvidia is absolutely up to the challenge. If it takes three years for AMD to really hone in their node, Nvidia's Turing will be razer sharp and potentially their next big thing will be here.
For the sake of the market and AMD, I truly hope they can really deliver something disruptive with the Navi architecture. If they can do to the GPU market what they've done to the CPU market, we can finally start to not only have great innovation in that market, but the competition and cheaper powerful GPUs can remove the huge barrier of entry to get more people into the master race.
