It’s not been a great week for Nvidia. It’s not that the GeForce RTX 3080 is underwhelming by any means, but stock has been almost impossible to come by, and some people have even ended up with dented, unboxed cards in the rush. Others have been plagued by crashes in the factory overclocked models, which isn’t a great start.
Will AMD face the same problems with its upcoming Big Navi Radeon 6000-series GPUs? Sensibly, no official statement has been forthcoming, but if you take Twitter banter as a useful indicator, then a lighthearted tweet from the company’s chief architect of gaming solutions, Frank Azor, is worth looking at.
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It all started with a tweet from Twitter user Andre Elijah who lamented the lack of availability of Nvidia’s cards. He finished the tweet with the words “$10 says AMD will be a paper launch too.”
Azor’s response? “I look forward to taking your $10 :)”
I look forward to taking your $10 :)September 24, 2020
While the kind of confidence is certainly encouraging to see, pride often comes before the fall. It’s reminiscent of the PS5 situation that saw the console going up for pre-order without warning, chaos predictably ensuing and Sony offering a full apology. The Xbox social media team saw an opportunity to handle things a little better with this tweet pointedly promising “the exact time pre-orders start”:
Pre-order 👉 September 22Worldwide launch in 36 countries 👉 November 10Hype 👉 9000+(don’t worry - we’ll let you know the exact time pre-orders start for you soon) pic.twitter.com/SLUrrtszyNSeptember 17, 2020
Despite the advanced warning, the pre-order process was just as chaotic as Sony’s, and now Amazon is sending out emails saying buyers may not get their consoles on day one. You just can’t account for circumstances.
Speaking of the next-generation consoles, they may play their own part in AMD GPU availability. Both systems will use AMD GPUs, which is based on the same architecture as the upcoming AMD Radeon 6000 series. So if the company can cope with that demand on top of its own PC cards, things are probably looking pretty comfortable.
Expectations are high for the Big Navi cards. These will be AMD’s first GPUs to support ray tracing, and early leaked specifications look very promising indeed, with performance that could be akin to the RTX 3080. If the company can maintain its historically lower prices, then it could be on to a winner.
All is set to be revealed on October 28 when the company unveils its new line of GPUs. If you’re more interested in AMD’s Zen 3 CPUs, they’ll be unveiled 20 days earlier on October 10.
