Rumor mill: It has lengthy been suspected that the Radeon RX 8000 collection – AMD’s subsequent technology of graphics playing cards – will focus completely on inexpensive mid-range merchandise. Nonetheless, this wasn’t at all times the plan. Newly unveiled code means that AMD canceled a flagship RDNA 4 mannequin which may have instantly competed with upcoming high-end choices from Intel and Nvidia.
Information-mined code that not too long ago emerged on the Anandtech boards signifies that AMD was engaged on an RDNA 4 GPU at one level, doubling a lot of the RX 7900 XTX’s system specs. Staff Purple hasn’t confirmed something concerning its upcoming graphics playing cards, however rumors recommend the corporate canceled the brand new flagship to deal with mainstream GPUs.
Consumer Kepler_L2 posted code suggesting that the chip codenamed “N4C,” prone to develop into the Radeon RX 8900 XTX, would have featured 9 shader engines, in comparison with the six present in AMD’s present flagship, the 7900 XTX. Moreover, the top-end RDNA 4 card might need not less than doubled the 7900 XTX’s chiplet depend from seven to between 13 and 20. One other consumer claimed that the variety of compute items would have elevated from 96 to 200.
Given the specs, the cardboard may have outperformed the present PC graphics king, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090. Talking of, Staff Inexperienced is anticipated to unveil a successor earlier than the tip of this yr with roughly a 70 % efficiency uplift. Furthermore, Intel plans to launch its first enthusiast-class GPU as a part of its sophomore Battlemage lineup this yr.
AMD reportedly shelved its high-end RDNA 4 plans to preserve restricted silicon for more and more worthwhile AI chips, so a three-way battle between flagship playing cards should wait till future generations.
Prior rumors concerning AMD, which ought to be taken with a grain of salt, recommend that the Radeon RX 8000 collection will debut this yr with two mid-range merchandise primarily based on the Navi 48 and Navi 44 GPUs. Navi 48 would possibly roughly equal the efficiency of an RX 7900 XT or RTX 4080 for lots of of {dollars} much less. In the meantime, the lower-end Navi 44 is projected to match the RTX 4060 Ti for lower than $300 and probably as little as $199.
Nonetheless, the RDNA 4 playing cards would possibly make compromises in sure areas. They might solely barely enhance upon RDNA 3’s ray tracing efficiency – an space through which AMD already lags behind Nvidia – and Kepler beforehand reported that the VRAM for each GPUs will stick with GDDR6 and solely attain 18Gbps. Nvidia’s upcoming merchandise will doubtless improve to quicker GDDR7.
AMD is anticipated to return to the high-end battleground with RDNA 5 subsequent yr, which is able to mark a transition to totally chiplet-based GPUs.
