AMD RDNA 3 flagship GPU could debut in December, but may fall short of Nvidia RTX 4090
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AMD’s first RDNA 3 graphics cards will arrive in December, according to the latest rumor about next-gen GPUs.
As Tom’s hardware (opens in new tab) reports, this comes from well-known leaker ECSM on bilibili (opens in new tab) (a Chinese video sharing platform), and while this person has been right about things on the vine in the past, we would still take this with a lot of spice. Especially since the speculation has been put in somewhat vague terms (that is, after translation – keep that in mind as well).
ECSM believes that the RX 7000 series will be unveiled in November (sounds about right), with the first graphics cards coming out in the second half of December – right when the holidays are approaching, actually. And which models are coming, you might ask?
The “first and second flagship” is the leaker’s claim, by which we mean the pair of graphics cards based on the top-end Navi 31 chip, presumably the RX 7900 XT and RX 7800 XT – but this is clearly the sketchier side of the speculation here.
The worrying part is that ECSM drives the idea that the AMD flagship might find it hard to compete in performance with Nvidia’s RTX 4000 series, which of course means the flagship RTX 4090.
Analysis: Don’t panic – even if that’s true, RDNA 3’s flagship could still be very competitive
It’s certainly true that there have been rumors going around for a long time that AMD will release its next-gen flagship first when it comes to RDNA 3 graphics cards, so of course this matches the information here.
We were hoping for the first RX 7000 offering to come out a little earlier, and indeed, if this date is correct, AMD is only just beeping with sales of next-gen products by the end of 2022, as promised.
As noted, it’s a little concerning that ECSM is casting doubt on how the top-end RDNA 3 GPU will perform against the RTX 4090. Just in case you were wondering, one of the commenters on Bilibili wondered whether to make this might have with ray – tracked performance or rasterization (traditional, without ray tracing) – and the leaker clarified that they meant both.
From what we’ve heard elsewhere, AMD certainly won’t be able to compete in ray tracing, but hopefully things will get much closer with rasterization. However, we can only value rumours so much, so let’s keep our fingers crossed that these somewhat ominous sounds are overly cautious speculation. While AMD’s flagship performance struggles to compete with Nvidia, there’s still room to price GPUs to make a compelling price/performance recipe.
If the dollar-per-dollar performance is beneficial to AMD – and indeed power consumption related performance, which of course adds up to additional cost savings in the longer run, especially with electricity prices inflated – then Team Red could still have the resources to set up a strong booth. in the next-gen GPU arena.
Remember, this is just the flagship end of the spectrum we’re talking about, which is a relatively niche proposition – and the mid-range (and indeed lower end) battle could turn out very differently.
Another tricky area will no doubt be the stock, where there will always be question marks about how much RX 7900 XT delivery AMD could amass. Because as we’ve seen, Nvidia was rumored to have strong levels of RTX 4090 stock initially, but that’s not what we’ve seen so far (keep an eye out for where to buy the RTX 4090 article as you update want about where the stock filters in).