AMD has confirmed that its long-rumored Big Navi graphics card will be the company's first RDNA 2-based product. also known as Navi 2x or simply Navi 2, this is a graphics card for enthusiasts, and AMD is offering PC gamers a It appears that AMD is trying to offer PC gamers a Radeon version of Nvidia's Titan or RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards.

Also, the fact that Big Navi is based on the upcoming RDNA 2 architecture means that it will support whatever approach AMD takes to ray tracing. In other words, given that Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing is the current API hook for PC games, it will no doubt be very similar to Nvidia's, but the exact details are not yet known. [At the recent Bank of America Securities Global Technology Conference, AMD CFO Devinder Kumar said, "There is a lot of excitement around Navi 2, or what our fans are calling Big Navi. This will be our first RDNA 2-based product."

The fact that the enthusiast-class Radeon Navi 2 card will be the first slice of RDNA 2 graphics silicon seems to indicate that it will precede the next generation of consoles that will also feature RDNA 2 GPUs. Microsoft's Xbox Series X and Sony's PlayStation 5 are slated for release during the year-end sales season, and will be announced in November.

Kumar reiterated that AMD "plans to announce its next-generation Zen 3 CPU and RDNA 2 GPU in late 2020."

"Big Navi is a halo product," Kumar said, continuing, "Enthusiasts like to buy the best, and we are committed to giving them the best."

This means that the Navi 2 card will be bigger, more expensive, and should genuinely deliver competitive gaming performance compared to Nvidia's top GPUs. Whether it will compare to the top graphics cards of the Turing generation and the upcoming Nvidia Ampere generation, however, will be a matter for the future. But hopefully it will be in the relatively near future.

However, the RDNA 2 architecture is not going to be confined to the high end of the GPU stack; all Radeon products will carry the Big Navi gene. [The RDNA 2 architecture will run through the entire stack, from mainstream GPUs to enthusiast GPUs. This allows us to leverage a larger ecosystem and accelerate development of exciting features such as ray tracing"

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AMD and Nvidia will go head-to-head in a high-performance showdown at the end of the year, with the GPU stack wars set to begin in 2021. And it can only be good for consumers to see the big GPU names engage in serious competition again.