AMD announces the first Big Navi benchmarks, blazing past 4K 60fps

AMD Radeon RX 6000-series graphics card
(Image credit: AMD)

The AMD Radeon RX 6000-series graphics card was the surprise guest star of today's 'Where Gaming Begins' livestream announcement of its Zen 3 processors. After announcing the first four Ryzen 5000-series CPUs—which could well steal the gaming performance crown from Intel—Dr. Lisa Su unveiled the first 'Big Navi' benchmarks.

AMD's CEO held up the first RX 6000-series card on stage, "which we now affectionately call 'Big Navi' thanks to many of you who nicknamed it for us. 

"It is absolutely gorgeous, and by far the most powerful gaming GPU we have ever built."

With a test machine running the 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X alongside the RX 6000-series GPU, presumably the top-spec version, we saw an in-engine demo of Borderlands 3 running at just over 60 fps at 4K on Badass quality.  

We also had a sneak peak at another couple of games running on the same all-AMD platform: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Gears of War 5. Both games where running on Ultra Quality settings and at 4K. CoD is running at almost 90 fps and Gears 5 is over 70 fps.

"What you see is tremendous 4K performance across the board. And we still have a few weeks until launch and the team is working really hard on fine tuning things. But I hope you're as excited as we are about what Ryzen 5000-series and Radeon 6000-series can do together for your next-generation PC."

We'll hear more about the new Radeon GPUs on October 28, when Dr. Su will be back for another announcement event, and the new Ryzen CPUs will actually be released on November 5. Let's hope there's enough stock or there are sure to be some fireworks that day.

Dave James
Managing Editor, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.