During its analyst day, AMD announced it’s ready to take on rival Nvidia in the high-end, performance gaming segment, and it will launch a line of graphics card that can deliver ray tracing, 4K resolution, and 3D audio support.
“We’re on the cusp of the next generation graphics and the next generation consoles,” said Rick Bergman, AMD’s executive vice president of Computing and Graphics. “We will use our latest technology, and our latest RDNA technology as well, creating this very immersive experience with ray tracing, 3D audio, and fast load times that will excite a new generation of gamers.”
Unlike AMD’s current crop of graphics cards, which rely on the first generation of RDNA technology, the new graphics cards slated for a debut towards the end of this year will rely on RDNA 2 backed by the company’s Navi 2 architecture.
While AMD has historically delivered competitive performance — its current RX 5600 and RX 5700 cards are targeted at 1080p and 1440p gamers, respectively — the new cards are aimed to make AMD more competitive in the premium GPU space, going toe-to-toe with Nvida’s RTX 2080, and its variants. Like AMD’s current graphics, RDNA 2 will be based on a 7 nanometer production process.
Bergman, and AMD CEO Lisa Su, stated this new generation of graphics will arrive on everything from PCs to consoles. RDNA 2 is slated to arrive later this year, Su said, while the new consoles will ship this holiday. AMD is working with both Microsoft and Sony on the next-generation Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. Both consoles will feature ray tracing support.
AMD’s numbers show the current generation of RDNA architecture delivered 50 percent better performance per watt compared to the older GCN architecture. RDNA 2 is promised to deliver a similar 50 percent improvement over RDNA.
Support for variable rate shading, or VRS, is key to AMD’s pitch. Current GeForce gamers who have opted to turn on ray tracing have done so with a sacrifice in performance, but AMD claims its hardware and software-driven approach means better sustained performance with the feature turned on.
“Of course, we have to have just stunning visuals, as well as [we had] talked about the importance of ray tracing and sharing the shadows and reflections and to be able to game at a very fluid consistent rate,” Bergman said. “So I add additional features, like variable rate shading as well, to give you that performance uplift so critical to that segment of the market.”
RDNA 2 is promised to deliver a 50 percent improvement over RDNA.
In the processor space, AMD’s next generation Zen 3 chip will also be built on a 7nm process. AMD’s Zen 4 processor, which could debut in either 2021 or 2022, will be based on a 5nm process. Like AMD, rival Intel is also eyeing the 5nm process.
Moving forward, AMD says its general purpose GPU architecture, or GPGPU, is no longer sufficient, and it will be migrating to domain-specific architectures that will target either gamers and creators, or compute-optimized architectures for data centers.
Gamers will continue to rely on AMD’s investment in its Radeon DNA, or RDNA, for graphics. Other use cases will be addressed by CDNA, or computer-optimized DNA, which targets data centers and makes scalability a priority.
The new CDNA architecture will target high performance computing with tensor operations, and AMD will combine its expertise with CPUs, GPUs, and software to deliver better performance and scalability. CDNA will be the path forward for AMD as it moves towards exascale supercomputers, like the new El Capitan system announced by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore Labs.
AMD did not reveal any specific price or availability information about new RDNA2 graphics cards, or game consoles that will use the architecture. RDNA2 hardware, including new game consoles like the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, are slated to arrive sometime in late 2020.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.