AMD might be relatively competitive with Nvidia's 2018 RTX graphics cards right now, but it might struggle in early 2020, when the green team is slated to introduce its next-generation Ampere architecture built on a similar 7nm process technology as used in AMD's recent RX generation of 5000 series GPUs.
Reportedly the new cards will be introduced in the first half of the year. That suggests more Q2 than Q1, but we may see a hint of the new cards at CES in January next year. They are expected to cover a wide range of GPUs throughout the pricing spectrum, but specifics on Ampere are currently quite thin on the ground.
What we do know, is that the new cards will be based on Samsung's 7nm EUV process and will deliver new levels of performance throughout the stack. While that process has required extensive retooling at the fabrication facilities, it actually delivers better cost efficiency, so we shouldn't see a price hike this generation as we did with Turing.
WCCFTech suggests that as with Turing, however, we should see a big focus on ray tracing. Nvidia's RT cores will be back in force, but with greater performance compared to their predecessors, we could see mid-range cards that can deliver above 1080p 30FPS with ray tracing effects enabled. We expect the highest end cards to offer 30 FPS 4K with ray tracing, even in heavy use titles. But 100+ FPS at 1440p on that sort of card should be possible too.
