AMD Big Navi: hits 'spitting distance' of GeForce RTX 3080 performance

I'm still benchmarking and playing around with my new GeForce RTX 3080 -- sorry guys, review will be here on September 16 though, and we have the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition Unboxing article right here.

But the world doesn't stop, and especially not now when both companies are ramping up into releasing their next-gen graphics cards. We know heaps about the GeForce RTX 3080 and there's even more I cannot say, but let's talk about AMD -- Big Navi is coming, and new rumors are surfacing about performance.

Moore's Law is Dead is "confident" that AMD will be releasing a new Navi 21-powered graphics card that will have performance that will be within "spitting distance of the RTX 3080 in rasterization performance. If AMD doesn't "beat" the 3080, they will assuredly crush the RTX 3070".

Some more notes from MLID:

• At least within spitting distance of the RTX 3080 in rasterization performance. If AMD doesn't "beat" the 3080, they will assuredly crush the RTX 3070.
• Substantially more efficient at originally intended clocks than Ampere, although they may push some models a bit to more directly compete with the 3080. Even when pushed, I do not expect these models to be power hogs.
• Potentially smaller than many people seem to expect, at least relative to Ampere. The specs I have just been made aware of are close to what I had incorrectly assumed must be Navi 22. This is made possible by incredible improvements to how RDNA manages memory and bandwidth. It should (for the first time since before GCN) make due with less bandwidth than NVIDIA counterparts.
• Provides Ray Tracing capabilities that overall exceed Turing, but likely underperform Ampere.
• No confirmation on what AMD's answer to DLSS will be, but they are "taking it seriously." The software stack is simply not confirmed yet.

Now, previous rumors also from MLID have detailed Big Navi at 40-50% faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti -- which is somewhere in the area of the GeForce RTX 3080 but not quite. The new rumor of performance within "spitting distance" (which I love the use of by the way) of the GeForce RTX 3080 is what I'm also hearing.

• You can read more on those Big Navi rumors here.

But even all the way back in January 2020 that I wrote a story headlined 'AMD Big Navi GPU: RTX 2080 Ti killer, but will lose to RTX 3080'.

In pure rasterization, I've had sources tell me Big Navi will get close to RTX 3080 performance -- but it will be the price war that will be the big one. We have no idea about ray tracing performance, I've been pushing every source I have and the biggest one has said "I haven't heard about performance in 3 months now, nothing apart from the leaks".

Ray tracing performance will be another big one -- maybe AMD will have some great ray tracing performance with RDNA 2 but I'm sure NVIDIA is going to utterly dominate in these areas (but again I'm willing to be surprised).

• Prediction: AMD is super competitive on price, totally surprises with great power efficiency to have near GeForce RTX 3080 levels of performance. NVIDIA retaliates with a 20GB version of the GeForce RTX 3080 that will keep up with the Big Navi card that will debut with 16GB of RAM.