Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 beatdown incoming – AMD unshackles 'Big Navi'

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 has increasingly looked like the the best graphics card card king in waiting, with a leaked futuristic next-gen design and outrageous benchmark scores leaving PC gamers salivating in anticipation.

The leaked benchmark scores were particularly enthusing, seemingly showing the RTX 3080 is set to deliver a 30 per cent performance increase over the RTX 2080 Ti Founder's Edition, which itself is insanely powerful.

And, with reports indicating the new RTX 30-series cards could be launching sooner than we all thought, it seemed only a matter of time until Nvidia re-asserted its dominance of the PC gaming graphics card market.

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That, though, looks like it may not come to pass after all, with a fresh leak revealing that AMD is soon to release a new GPU referred to as 'Big Navi', and that the graphics card will deliver up to 50 per cent more performance over a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.

The leak's source is YouTube channel Moore's Law is Dead, who claims to have uncovered information that shows that Big Navi will deliver between 40 to 50 per cent more performance, and that the info comes from "someone who's been right before several times".

According to the information received, the Big Navi card will come with a total of 76CUs split into two clusters, which means the GPU will have 4,608 stream processors. A 384-bit bus and GDDR6 video memory with a maximum clock speed of 2,510MHz are also apparently on the cards.

Now, on paper, that sounds impressive. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, for comparison, features only 4,352 CUDA cores, a 352-bit bus, and GDDR6 memory that runs up to 1,545MHz.

The fact that this leak suggests that the Big Navi card will deliver a 40 to 50 per cent increase in performance over the RTX 2080 Ti, where the leaked RTX 3080 benchmarks only showed a 30 per cent increase, also seems to indicate that on paper the AMD card is more powerful.

Of course, though, all this information stems from leaks and, as such, should be taken with a big pinch of salt. And what also must be considered is that we don't have any benchmarks for Big Navi yet, just a verbal report that it is more powerful. Here at T3, we always think the truth comes out in actual benchmark tests, so we will wait to pass definitive judgement until we hear more.

Lastly, it is also worth remembering that there are multiple cards incoming in the Nvidia Geforce RTX 30-series, so we may yet see a flagship from that range outpunch the Big Navi.

Both AMD and Nvidia are currently called to be launching their new GPUs around September, so we don't have too much time left to wait to find out for sure.

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