Navi, Navi, Navi. We might not have known it at the time, but we’ve been waiting for
it since 2016. It first appeared back then at the far end
of AMD’s graphics card roadmap, as the most futuristic and efficient of AMD’s planned
designs. We didn’t know much about it for years, but after Vega came out and wasn’t
enough to steal the performance crown from Nvidia, people put their faith in Navi, hoping
it would be the architecture to bring fierce competition back to the graphics card market.
And thus the meme, ‘Wait for Navi’ was born. At first, it was chanted at those asking
about the future of graphics cards. And then it just generally became a dank meme that
made its way into every graphics card discussion on the internet.
The speculation began. People started to look at this earliest roadmap- which I bet AMD
regrets making now. According to it, Polaris was scheduled to come out midway through 2016,
Vega at the end of 2016, and Navi at the end of 2017, JUST BEFORE 2018 on this roadmap.
Polaris arrived on schedule, on June 29th of 2016. Vega was delayed by half a year,
only shipping in numbers for gaming in the second half of 2017. And while Vega was delayed
by just over half a year, Navi was delayed by a year and a half, with its first cards
coming out half way through 2019, and with products still continuing to trickle out at
lower price-points. But all that’s known with hindsight. At
the time, we didn’t know what was going on with Navi. AMD remained quiet about it…
and people started to lose hope. That it would be too little, too late. Maybe AMD had scrapped
Navi altogether. But it did come out… and it turns out that
Navi is actually pretty good. Rather unexpectedly, it was an entirely new design. And from it,
it was able to squeeze more gaming performance from smaller designs than AMD had ever managed
before. Right now it comes in the form of the 5500,
the 5600 and 5700 series to cater for 1080p and 1440p gaming. And yet, in a way… we’re
still waiting for Navi. You see, while the cards that are out are
actually the ones that most of us end up buying and using, people look to the flagship product
as an indicator of how well a company’s doing. Doesn’t matter if that’s right
or wrong. It’s just the way it is. And there’s still a question mark over whether Navi will
be able to bring the fight to Nvidia’s high-end. The fastest Navi card, the 5700 XT, is ALMOST
as fast as the 2070-Super. But no Navi card is out that’s fast enough to compete with
the 2080, the 2080-Super, or Nvidia’s flagship, the 2080 TI. There’s the HOPE that a big
Navi is coming. And Lisa Su confirmed its existence, so there’s that as well.
The other thing to mention is that there’s no hardware support for Raytracing with first-gen
Navi cards, either- which also puts AMD cards at a disadvantage when directly compared to
the Nvidia competition. But all this stuff is coming. We’ve just
got to wait for it a little longer. What made the 5700 XT so exciting was that
it used just 40 CUs, and yet was much faster than their previous-gen Vega architecture
would have been with 40 CUs. Clearly, Navi is much more efficient. And it got people
speculating- Vega went up to 64 CUs. What if AMD released a 64 CU Navi card? Maybe that
would be enough to compete with- or even to beat- Nvidia’s 2080 TI for performance!
And what if they go further still? What about a 80-CU card? 96? 128?!?! A new architecture
makes people forget about past limitations, and lets their imaginations run wild.
I think we’ll have to wait for second-generation Navi before we get these bigger cards, and
that’s where the excitement’s at right now. A second-generation Navi should be able
to squeeze even more performance out of the architecture. It’s what the next-generation
of consoles will be powered by. And it should finally have hardware support for raytracing!
In short: it should allow for AMD’s graphics cards to compete directly against Nvidia’s
entire lineup. Of course, Nvidia’s yet to make their move and I expect if they were
to move to 7 nm their new cards would be FORMIDABLE! But let’s save that for another video.
People weren’t just waiting on Navi for flagship performance. Prices in the graphics
card market have been stale for years! You don’t get much more for your money now than
you would have 3 years ago, and I think that many people had been holding onto their old
cards, waiting for Navi to come along and to start a massive price-war before upgrading,
a bit like Ryzen did to the CPU market a few years ago!
But that hasn’t happened. Graphics card prices have barely dropped at all. Back in
2016, the Radeon 480 sold for $200. Now, the 5500 XT, which is a tiny bit faster, can be
had for… $170. Or the 8 GB version for $200. Not exactly much of an improvement.
So why haven’t graphics card prices dropped? For the last few years, AMD has been playing
catch-up with Nvidia. Nvidia starts by launching new, high-powered cards which are too expensive
for most people to get. AMD comes along a bit later with competing cards, both sides
lower their prices… and everybody buys Nvidia. It kind of sucked for AMD.
So this time, AMD’s not doing this. They are releasing Navi later than Nvidia’s cards,
but for the same prices. And people are angry with AMD for this because they really wanted
to have a new Nvidia card. I can’t blame AMD for this new approach.
Undercutting the competition sounds like it should work, but it wasn’t. I think AMD
has decided that it wasn’t the performance of their cards that was the problem- it was
their low prices! Maybe they had a reputation for being the poor-man’s choice BECAUSE
they always sold for less than the competition. So now with Navi I think they’re trying
to change their image by charging the same premium prices as Nvidia do. Because why not.
Like it or not, I think it’s working! A week before Navi’s launch, AMD announced
the prices, which were higher than everybody expected and people were disappointed. Nvidia
responded by announcing new, faster cards for the same prices to ruin Navi’s launch.
Initially this worked- everybody thought Navi had been defeated before it had even been
released… but then, just a day or so before it launched, AMD announced a last-minute price-cut
and everybody thought ‘oh okay Navi’s good again now’.
By announcing it at $450 and then by dropping it last-minute to $400, people saw Navi as
a good deal. Let’s consider AMD just did the same as they’ve done in the past, by
announcing Navi at a lower price of $300. AMD would once again have missed out on phat
profit margins, while Nvidia, having always sold for a premium, would suddenly look like
a bargain should they respond by lowering their prices, and people would have bought
the Nvidia option because of it. And the last example I’m going to use, to
really show the effect that changing prices can have on the value of a product, imagine
AMD had announced Navi for $300 and then had upped it to $400 last minute. Even though
the end price is the same as what we actually got, people would have hated them for doing
that. By starting with a premium price and then by dropping it, they were able to make
people more accepting of a higher price-point. I still remember a time when AMD would have
launched a 5700-tier of graphics card for $250, but years of premium prices have changed
public perception of what’s acceptable for this tier of card. While I remember how things
used to be, I suspect most people don’t, and even if they did… what are they going
to do about it. Navi costs more than it could have done, but the prices are still in line
with what Nvidia’s charging. The Navi cards themselves are good! They’re
competitively efficient, and their performance levels are suitable for 1080p and 1440p gaming
for at least a few years to come. The only issue really is the price- and luckily, that’s
the easiest thing for AMD to change. Because while they’re selling for premium prices,
I don’t think they cost much to make. It’s not like they’re using expensive memory,
like Vega did. And their die sizes are small enough to keep costs down, especially as 7nm
matures. Price-drops are definitely a very feasible route for AMD to consider- it’s
just a matter of when they’ll do this. What you need to take away from this is the
age-old saying, ‘there’s no such thing as a bad product, only a bad price’. DON’T
dismiss Navi as though the cards are going to remain at their current price-points forever
more. Make yourself familiar with their performance levels, and the prices at which you’d consider
them to be a ‘good deal’. A little bit of speculation on my behalf, but I think AMD’s
trying to avoid a price-war before they have all of their Navi cards released and available
to buy. Right now, there are a few reasons for why
they shouldn’t cut prices. For a start… even at current prices, they’re still competitive
with similarly priced alternatives! Secondly, there are still old cards in circulation that
need to go- preferably for as much as AMD can get for them! And while Navi is good,
Nvidia still has the performance crown- and that’s a powerful tool for Nvidia to utilise
should there be a price-war. And lastly, there’s the uncertainty about what Nvidia (and Intel!)
might release in the future. For now, I think that AMD are happy just to sit back and to
wait for others to make the first move, to which they’ll respond, much like they did
with Navi’s launch in the first place. So while the first wave of cards may be out,
I think Navi is yet to make the splash it has the potential to cause. The wait for Navi
isn’t over just yet.