After the stunning success of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 30 Series reveal event, the pressure is firmly on AMD to demonstrate that its new cards will be able to compete with the huge leaps in performance shown, particularly when it comes to ray tracing. The first signs of a forthcoming announcement have appeared, with the discovery of an AMD Easter egg hidden in Fortnite.
The surprise was found by Gina Darling, an AMD sponsored Facebook streamer who was playing a special custom AMD map. She entered the code 6000 at a specific location to reveal the message "Something big is coming to the AMD Battle Arena." This clearly points to the upcoming graphics cards, given that the expected RX6000 branding for the RDNA2 powered Navi 2X series matches the secret code, following the RX5000 naming of the current generation cards.
Senior staff at AMD have also been sharing comments recently, suggesting that the rumors of Navi 2X not living up to Nvidia's hardware may not be accurate. In particular, Scott Herkelman, the CVP & GM of AMD Radeon tweeted a simple but effective reply to someone questioning its ability to match the RTX 30 Series performance.
One advantage AMD will have in its battle with Nvidia is that AMD Navi 2X graphics technology will power both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X next generation consoles. This should ensure that cross format developers quickly become used to optimizing for strong performance on the AMD hardware, and may create an incentive for games to be created with its hardware in mind. Particularly given AMD will be focusing on ray tracing for both console and PC hardware, and is aiming to help developers to implement the feature more easily.
While the discovery of the easter egg by an AMD streamer in an AMD map was clearly a staged marketing stunt, it shows that AMD is not hanging around when it comes to showing how the RDNA2 powered next generation cards will compete with those of Nvidia. Combined with the Twitter comments from senior leaders, it suggests that the company is more confident than might be expected after such a well-received reveal by its main competitor. Given the already huge gains for gamers with the high power and low pricing of the Nvidia RTX 3080 and 3070, if AMD can bring strong competition then late 2020 and 2021 may just be the best time ever for reasonably priced graphics upgrades.
Amid record stock prices, AMD have already stated that gamers will see the high-end RDNA2 cards launch this year, and the latest comments and marketing hints suggest that the wait for an official announcement may not be too long.
AMD's Navi 2X graphics cards are due to launch later in 2020.
Source: HotHardware Via Wccftech