AMD’s next-gen pitch to PC gamers begins on October 8 with Zen 3

It’s been a pretty huge day for console gaming, with Microsoft confirming the Xbox Series S and Series X price and release date. However, the PC gaming realm isn’t about to be left out.
AMD has revealed teased the dawn of its Zen 3 and Big Navi era – the answer to the new Nvidia RTX graphics chips for desktop – will begin in earnest on October 8. In a tweet, the company’s president and CEO Dr. Lisa Su promised an ‘exciting fall ahead’ for gamers, starting with the Zen 3 launch a month from now.
This is thought to be the rumoured next-generation Ryzen 4000 CPU, the first commercial processors to be built using the brand new Zen 3 architecture and a major improvement over its predecessor. There’s no word on how powerful the Zen 3 Ryzen 4000 desktop processors will be just yet, so October 8 can’t come soon enough.
Related: Best Graphics Cards 2020
The company has also confirmed that the AMD RDNA 2 graphics processors will arrive on October 28. Those GPUs will be direct competitors to the Nvidia RTX 3080. AMD is yet to reveal specs, but has said they will feature RDNA 2 architecture that supports variable-rate shading and hardware-based ray tracing.
Su wrote: “It’s going to be an exciting fall for gamers… time to start a new journey with @AMDRyzen Zen3 and @Radeon RDNA2.” There’s nothing in the way of new information about the product here here, but can see the teaser clip below:
It’s going to be an exciting fall for gamers… time to start a new journey with @AMDRyzen Zen3 and @Radeon RDNA2 pic.twitter.com/O9SXvLo4y0
— Lisa Su (@LisaSu) September 9, 2020
The new era of CPU and GPU from AMD comes after Nvidia impressed mightily with the launch of the RTX series processors.
The RTX 3090 is the most powerful of the bunch with the company saying it’ll handle 8K gaming at 60fps. Our computing editor Ryan Jones writes: “such power would make it the most powerful gaming GPU on the market, with no current AMD GPU coming remotely close. It’s unlikely any upcoming AMD Big Navi graphics card will be able to compete, although don’t rule them out entirely.”
The RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 have also been announced and both are capable of 4K gaming. “This is where AMD is likely will be competitive,” Jones adds, “with the company already confirming high-end Big Navi graphics cards will be 4K-capable and will support ray tracing.”