Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) topped over $34 last week when the company said it would supply chips for Samsung. It also announced Navi at E3. And markets noticed the technical achievement. Although investors are willing to pay over 30 times earnings for the stock, compared to around the 21 times forward P/E for Nvidia stock (NASDAQ:NVDA), AMD finally has its GPU lineup ready.
AMD announced the RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 for $449 and $379, respectively. The GPUs will compete with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2060 and RTX 2070, respectively. At the 7nm manufacturing process, AMD will show the RDNA architecture performing on par or better than the Nvidia equivalent. The GDDR6 memory, which Nvidia uses in its GPU, will increase the amount of memory bandwidth available.
AMD plans to release the GPUs bundled with game titles. The package may help drive consumers to AMD over Nvidia’s offering. The bad news is that at similar pricing to its competitor products, unit sales may not start strong.
AMD is unlikely to lose money on each unit sale but it may have to cut prices to differentiate its GPU from Nvidia’s RTX cards. Plus, a few features are missing with these RX cards. There is no HDMI 2.1 support, variable rate pixel shading or hardware ray tracing. AMD has good prospects with the Navi launch underway as it looks to take back GPU market share from Nvidia.
