Nvidia's Ampere isn't the only GPU fruit, you know, there is also the looming prospect of the AMD Big Navi graphics cards arriving soon too. Big Navi, also known as the Radeon RX 6000-series, also known as RDNA 2, also known as Navi 21, has more aliases than actual confirmed specs at this point, but AMD's Frank Azor (one-time Mr. Alienware) has teased that something might be coming out tomorrow.
A not so cryptic tweet (via Videocardz) sent this morning—or yesterday evening, depending on your timezone—has Azor belting out the Annie classic 'Tomorrow' in text form. It was later retweeted by AMD's director of marketing, Sasa Marinkovic, so it's looking likely this is a genuine official tease rather than Azor just espousing his love of showtunes.
The timezone thing could be important given that he is potentially suggesting there will be some sort of AMD-based happening 'tomorrow', but whether that means September 9 or September 10 we won't find out until it happens. Whatever 'it' is...
AMD recently dropped an Easter egg into its Battle Arena map in Fortnite, which was 'discovered' by an AMD-sponsored streamer. In order to see the message "SOMETHING BIG IS COMING TO THE AMD BATTLE ARENA!" you had to jump through a few hoops, one of which was entering the passcode '6000'.
"The sun'll come outTomorrowSo ya gotta hang on'Til tomorrowCome what mayTomorrow, tomorrow!I love ya tomorrow!You're alwaysA dayAway!"September 9, 2020
So yeah, before you get too pumped about AMD definitely announcing its new Big Navi GPU via Fortnite tomorrow (or today, whatever), it's probably worth tempering some of that fervent anticipation. We're not expecting the first AMD cards to arrive until October with add-in board (AIB) partners likely to be following in November with their own designs.
We've spoken to some AIBs and they still don't even know what the next-gen AMD RDNA 2 cards are going to be called. All we can say is that they're going to be sporting Navi 21 GPUs.
So we're likely still a little way from a full reveal of the actual new RX 6000-series graphics cards, but that doesn't mean AMD isn't going to drop SOMETHING BIG into its Battle Arena map, something that hints at either specs or a countdown to an actual announcement date.
Or maybe even a full card render that eclipses the sun.
With Nvidia about to fully launch its RTX 3080 on September 14 I would be hugely surprised if AMD did not want to get a teaser of some sort out about its own new high-end graphics card ahead of that date.
