In a few weeks, AMD will unveil its own next-generation graphics cards, the Radeon RX 6000 series, to compete with Nvidia's recently announced GeForce RTX 30 series, and all eyes are on the "Big Navi" to see how it will perform. The best-case scenario is that it will match or surpass (maybe even beat) competitors in a similarly aggressive price range, but will it actually be available for purchase, which AMD is confident it will be?

This is an appropriate question and concern given that the GeForceRTX3080 and 3090 sold out in minutes, Nvidia underestimated how popular the Ampere launch would be, and even worse, consumers had to compete with bots and duffers for inventory. Now they have to compete with bots and duffers for inventory.

Complaints also spilled over into social media, one of which was answered by Frank Azor, AMD's chief architect for gaming solutions. One user lamented on Twitter that he could not afford the 3090, adding, "For $10, AMD says it's a piece of paper too."

"Looking forward to receiving your $10 :)," Azor replied. And in a follow-up tweet, he noted that AMD is "setting the right expectations and doing our best to meet them. We are listening, learning, and adapting to provide the best experience," he said. What do you receive from this?

Little by little, AMD is touting its Radeon RX 6000 series. Last week, for example, AMD worked with Epic to bring a render of the upcoming card to "Fortnite" and also released an actual press render showcasing a "brand new cooler design."

At least some of AMD's next-generation cards will support real-time ray tracing at the hardware level, which is also a feature of the custom RDNA 2 GPUs in the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.

As for pricing and performance, we will have to wait for the official announcement to know. Nevertheless, rumors suggest that AMD's top-of-the-line product will be somewhere between the RTX 3080 and 3070 in terms of both price and performance, and could feature as many as a whopping 80 compute units. When we covered this rumor, Dave noted that it would be "a very attractive GPU" if it were at least $150 cheaper and closer in performance to the 3080. We will have to wait and see for a while.

AMD plans to officially announce its next-generation cards on October 28.