If AMD undercuts Nvidia’s GPU pricing
and does so with GPUs that lack ray tracing, it could be read as a tacit admission that Nvidia has established ray tracing as a feature that customers will pay more for. When AMD introduced Radeon VII, it deliberately didn’t price that GPU any lower than the RTX 2080, despite the fact that the Radeon VII completely lacks ray tracing. It is possible that the company will do something similar here, or choose to split the difference by pricing below the equivalent RTX GPU it intends to compete with, but not so low as to imply that Nvidia has properly priced in the value of ray tracing.
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But as it stands, this rumor is, at best, incomplete. It implies an odd pricing structure that would require AMD to hit much higher clocks on GCN than it has ever demonstrated a capability to hit. The core counts also imply that AMD is relying heavily on efficiency gains to hit its performance targets, but efficiency gains in GPUs have been
hard to come by of late. Vega was not, generally speaking, a large efficiency gain over previous versions of GCN. Could Navi change that? Yes. But historically, we’ve seen GPUs gain the most performance either by clock boosts (which GCN hasn’t been very good at) or core count increases (which this rumor implies have not occurred).
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The proposed price structure makes limited sense without massive clock increases to drive performance in the upper tier products. And finally, it’s not clear why AMD would build two completely different chips between Navi 10 and Navi 20 if the difference between the two is just a 7 percent core count increase. This is much less of a gap than exists between the various Nvidia GPUs in their respective brackets and custom designs.
