AMD Plants Big Navi Radeon 6000 Easter Egg in Fortnite

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By Niels Broekhuijsen
last updated

Fire up the rumor mill

(Image credit: AMD)

It's not unusual to see manufacturers wait on each other's launches before starting their own. This is particularly true in the realm of graphics cards. Now that Nvidia has spent some time in the spotlight with Ampere, it looks like AMD is spooling up its launch program for its Big Navi series of graphics cards, too, as told by an easter egg planted by AMD in a Fortnite map.

The Easter egg was found by a streamer passing through the AMD Battle Arena that launched a few days ago. Streamer GinaDarling found a teasing text stating "something big is coming to the AMD battle arena," after having to enter a passcode "6000" into a terminal to proceed.

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Of course, this first teaser doesn't tell us anything -- other than the next series of GPUs from AMD will be the Radeon 6000 series. You could say that we're reading too much into it, but AMD's Scott Herkelman, CVP & GM at AMD Radeon, congratulated Gina on finding the easter egg, which surely has to mean something.

But without making more of it than it is, it does show that AMD is getting started on the Radeon 6000 series, which, if I may say, is about time. In January, Lisa Su promised that we would be seeing Big Navi this year, and as we just entered September, there's not a lot of time left to go. 

Rumors have a launch pinned for October 7th, but with the rumor mill being eerily quiet, we're not so sure that will happen.

For more about AMD's Big Navi and RDNA2 GPUs, check out our everything-we-know summary that contains all the info we know thus far. 

Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

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46 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Avro Arrow
    That's really strange. I would've expected AMD to be intimidated by nVidia's amazing launch of the RTX 3000 series but this would seem to be the antithesis of that. Did ATi pull a rabbit out of their hat? If ATi cooked up something good and there's a mole at AMD, then nVidia's sudden "conscience" when it comes to pricing makes sense. I'm not getting my hopes up though. If they do, great. If they don't, then we're no worse off than we were before so why worry?
    Reply
  • chickenballs
    Understandable that they really want all the Fortnite kids to buy their gpu but it's not exactly a demanding title...
    Reply
  • Chung Leong
    It's going to be a sad launch if AMD isn't willing to be aggressive on pricing.
    Reply
  • NightHawkRMX
    I am interested to see if amd can compete with rtx 3000
    Reply
  • nofanneeded
    AMD isnt going to win anything this time IMO , because now we can game with acceptable frame rates with raytracing enabled .. and I dont think that AMD can perfect raytracing from their first release even if they tried to do it.

    Even if they succeed in reaching 30 tflops (which I doubt) ,, they cant compete in raytracing from the first time.
    Reply
  • Shadowclash10
    Avro Arrow said:
    That's really strange. I would've expected AMD to be intimidated by nVidia's amazing launch of the RTX 3000 series but this would seem to be the antithesis of that. Did ATi pull a rabbit out of their hat? If ATi cooked up something good and there's a mole at AMD, then nVidia's sudden "conscience" when it comes to pricing makes sense. I'm not getting my hopes up though. If they do, great. If they don't, then we're no worse off than we were before so why worry?
    Well, if they are intimidated, so what? They have to release Big Navi, even if they know it can't compete.
    Reply
  • jkflipflop98
    It's going to have to be something pretty danged special if they're going to best Nvidia's 30xx line. If the benchmarks hold up to the specs, Nvidia have crafted another legendary GPU.
    Reply
  • d0x360
    Avro Arrow said:
    That's really strange. I would've expected AMD to be intimidated by nVidia's amazing launch of the RTX 3000 series but this would seem to be the antithesis of that. Did ATi pull a rabbit out of their hat? If ATi cooked up something good and there's a mole at AMD, then nVidia's sudden "conscience" when it comes to pricing makes sense. I'm not getting my hopes up though. If they do, great. If they don't, then we're no worse off than we were before so why worry?

    The only real performance uplift that matters in the 3000 series is ray tracing performance and that's a matter of just adding more rt hardware...

    So we don't know what amd has obviously but surely amd knew the general performance gains nVidia was going for.

    Watching nvidias unveil was exciting..but they didn't really provide any game benchmarks they just said it's this much better than that. So it's very possible that big navi could go toe to toe with the 3080.

    Also don't forget amd has their own equivalent to DLSS along with plenty of other tech from the consoles that will absolutely be in whatever we get on pc.. but it will be amplified. So I wouldn't write them off quite yet. Even if they didn't match the 3080 this time I'd wager that they would absolutely be able to go toe to toe with the 4000 series.
    Reply
  • d0x360
    What benchmarks? Doom? Ooooooh. I can run doom at 4k max settings at 100+fps on my 2080ti ftw3. That's with +150 core +600 men. I can go up to +1000 mem.
    Reply
  • Shadowclash10
    d0x360 said:
    The only real performance uplift that matters in the 3000 series is ray tracing performance and that's a matter of just adding more rt hardware...

    So we don't know what amd has obviously but surely amd knew the general performance gains nVidia was going for.

    Watching nvidias unveil was exciting..but they didn't really provide any game benchmarks they just said it's this much better than that. So it's very possible that big navi could go toe to toe with the 3080.

    Also don't forget amd has their own equivalent to DLSS along with plenty of other tech from the consoles that will absolutely be in whatever we get on pc.. but it will be amplified. So I wouldn't write them off quite yet. Even if they didn't match the 3080 this time I'd wager that they would absolutely be able to go toe to toe with the 4000 series.
    The thing is, however non-descriptive Nvidia truly was with the RTX 3000 reveal (as in, they said x new card is x amound faster than x old card) - AMD has given us no details about Big Navi. And over the last 2 years (IE Turing), Nvidia has released many more GPUs and added important features like DLSS 2.0 - AMD hasn't done anything like that yet. I'm not saying they won't, but they haven't done so already.
    Reply