AMD Will Announce Two Navi Powered Graphics Cards on Monday

An unnamed Sapphire product manager and PR director told the Chinese tech press about the plans to launch AMD Navi GPU next week. According to Zhihu over in China, two Navi GPU-based cards will be announced on May 27th, 2019. That sounds highly plausible as it lines up with COMPUTEX 2019 International Press Conference & CEO Keynote that takes place on Monday at 10:00am in Taipei. The ‘CEO Keynote Speech’ is being done by Dr. Lisa Su President & CEO, AMD.

The two cards are expected to be aimed at enthusiasts & gamers at the $399 and $499 price points. The $499 Navi ‘XT’ GPU based product will be the fully featured part and then there will be the $399 Navi ‘Pro’ GPU based card using a slightly cut down version. The Sapphire employees mentioned that the flagship sku would have stronger than NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 performance without ray-tracing hardware. The less costly alternative should provide performance that is between the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 series cards.

This sounds promising from a performance perspective, but we can’t wait to see what AMD has done for power efficiency. Sapphire said that they are working on custom PCB designs for the Navi architecture, and mentioned that a water cooled “Toxic” version is complete. Hopefully a water cooled card at launch isn’t a sign that it runs hot and power hungry!

After the Navi unveiling at the Computex 2019 we expect to learn even more about the cards during AMD’s Next Horizon Gaming Event that takes place on June 19th at E3. The rumored launch schedule is said to be on or around July 7th.