AMD has been slowly stoking the fires of the Big Navi Hype Train over the course of this year.
Using the RDNA2 architecture as its base, Big Navi graphics feature in next-gen consoles from Sony and Microsoft. It's coming to the PC in its most fulsome form by way of the Radeon RX 6000 series.
We know AMD has an uphill battle to usurp Nvidia's latest RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 as they provide a much stiffer challenge than Ryzen meets against Intel Core on the CPU front. That said, expectations are high that, if you excuse the pun, AMD can get back into the high-end graphics game.
Whetting the appetites of those eager to see how it plays out from a performance perspective, with due knowledge of just how fast Nvidia's finest are, AMD offered up a teaser of RX 6000-series numbers at 4K.
The provisos are longer than this article, insofar as AMD provides internal numbers, doesn't define exactly which Big Navi card it is, and the underlying Ryzen 9 5900X system is not available to buy for a few weeks.
However, the interesting part is that we use two of those games in our own graphics testing: Borderlands 3 and Gears 5. It also appears that AMD is using exactly the same settings we do, so a tenuous comparison against what we have in the databanks isn't totally amiss. Bear in mind that we could be wrong with the settings and the graphs therefore make no sense.
With that out of the way, below we show you where this purported card would fit into the wider high-end GPU landscape. Please take the graph as totally illustrative rather than scientific. Doing it this way provides better context into probable performance.
After taking what we show you with the relevant handfuls of salt, what do you think? Does Big Navi meet your expectations? Are you surprised at this announcement? Do tell us in the comments section below.
Eager to learn more, AMD will provide juicier details during its Gaming Event on October 28.
