AMD’s Radeon RDNA 2 graphics architecture will reportedly be revealed at CES 2020

CES 2020 is expected to a big deal for AMD, who are rumoured to launch new 7nm Zen 2 powered Ryzen mobile CPUs at the same even alongside their long-rumoured 48-core and 64-core Threadripper processors.

AMD’s Radeon RDNA 2 graphics cards are rumoured to contain support for hardware-accelerated ray-tracing, a feature which AMD’s current-generation RDNA graphics cards lack. This makes sense given how both Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox “Scarlett” both promise raytracing support while using Radeon graphics hardware.       

This information comes via Wjm47196, a leaker over on the Chiphell Forums who has been correct regarding Radeon graphics leaks in the past. This includes the predicted launch of AMD’s Radeon RX 590 in late 2018 and the Radeon VII in Q1 2019 and the release of Navi in mid-2019. 

Right now, AMD has revealed very little about its Navi 2 architecture, but given the largely revamped nature of AMD RDNA architecture, it is likely that AMD has other significant changes to implement. Support for hardware-accelerated raytracing is one likely feature, though it is possible that we will see further architectural changes that will help increase Radeon’s graphics IPC. This would help AMD generate higher levels of system performance in normal gaming workloads. 

With RDNA 2, AMD is also likely to target the high-end of the graphics card market, bringing Radeon into the realms of Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Super and RTX 2080 Ti. This would require a GPU with more memory bandwidth, forcing AMD to adopt a larger GDDR6 memory bus, perhaps 384-bit, or utilise HBM2/HBM2E memory. Nvidia is also likely to launch post-Turing graphics cards sometime in 2020.