AMD plans to release the Big Navi graphics card later this year, but there are more rumors about its performance, release date, and price than there are about the Ryzen 4000 CPU.

After all, greedy rumor mills need fodder. So it is no great surprise that there are those who troll for rumors, sometimes via engineers, sometimes via corporate PR teams, just as there are detailed and genuine leaks that pop up from time to time.

And that seems to be what we got here from a few slides that were pitched to some YouTubers and published on Moore's Law is Dead. To be fair, after discussing the slides, they admit that they are likely fabrications.

Not surprisingly, there are only three slides, each as dubious as the next. First up is the specs and price list, with the recently announced new Radeon branding at the top. See, it's super realistic, isn't it? However, that branding is not applied to the card pictured, which has the old brand logo on a shroud that looks like an RX 5700 reference card pasted over an image of a water-cooled Vega GPU.

Certainly, this would not be the first time AMD has messed up a new GPU slide. Last year's E3 presentation still had an image calling the RX 5700 XT the RX 690...

Underneath this branding is a series of specs that are not a million miles off from all the rumored numbers we have heard since the first speculation about a high-end GPU based on the Navi graphics architecture. Frankly, we could have put it together ourselves back in August/September of last year.

Now on to the actual performance slides: the first one is a straight 4K gaming performance graph highlighting 10 different games and the relative performance of the RX 6900XT compared to Nvidia's RTX 2080 Ti. For reference, the RX 6900XT is 52% faster than the flagship Turing GPU and costs only $999. That's a bargain.

The next slide concerns the real-time ray tracing performance of RDNA 2, the fact that in the current DXR-enabled game suite, at worst, you can get 91% of nonraytraced frame rate performance. AMD's marketing department has been working with RDNA 2's ray tracing implementation should be called RXRT, then RXRT does not seem to have the same performance penalty as Turing's RT core.

Frankly, I have no idea about the veracity of these numbers.

Like the real benchmark numbers, they feel like they were just plucked out of thin air. But the slides themselves definitely look fake in all kinds of ways, something that AdoredTV has also pointed out, and the amount of aliasing in the headline text itself is concerning AdoredTV claims to have seen the exact same slides, but for the reasons I have already mentioned, I decided not to take them up immediately. I chose not to.

As bogus as these slides seem, Big Navi is likely to arrive this year and offer the kind of gaming performance that will make Turing uneasy; fortunately for Nvidia, their consumer GPU, the Ampere GPU, will go up against Big Navi. will be up against Big Navi. And no matter what happens between these two graphics card powerhouses, it is looking more and more like the golden age of 4K gaming is looming large.