Good news for gamers: AMD may launch two new budget gaming GPUs
The rumor mill is churning as ever and this time the rumor is that AMD’s Radeon RDNA 3 series could be getting two new budget entry-level graphics cards: the RX 7400 and RX 7300. If true, it would be under the AMD Radeon RX 7600‘s price of $259, considered one of the best graphics cards on the market.
There are two sources for this leaked information (reported by PCGamesNwhere the first is a tweet from KOMACHI_ENSAKA that reads “Radeon RX 7400 & RX 7300” and a winking emoji, while the second is a follow-up tweet that reads “0x7499, NV33.” In the second message, the NV33 portion refers to the Navi 33 GPU powering the RX 7600, and the 0x7499 portion is a device identifier referring to a graphics card model – in this case, it refers to three different model types.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard rumors of AMD developing more budget-friendly cards. Back in 2023, there were already rumors that one of the RDNA 4 would be a mid-range card at an affordable price, which turned out to be the RX 7600.
So these rumors might turn out to be reliable, which would be good news for gamers looking for much cheaper options.
Possible specifications for the RX 7400 and 7300
While there is currently no other information available regarding the two potential budget cards, we can still guess at what specs they might feature. Looking at the RX 7600, it sports 2,048 RDNA 3 stream processors spread across 32 compute units (CUs), along with 8GB of GDDR6 memory serving up a 128-bit memory bus running at up to 2,655MHz.
The last-gen RX 6500 XT, meanwhile, featured a GPU with 1,024 RDNA 2 stream processors (16 CUs), while the RX 6400 had 768 RDNA 2 stream processors (12 CUs). Therefore, an ideal range would be the RX 7400 with at least 16 CUs, but preferably up to 20 CUs, while the RX 7300 would have at least 12 CUs, but preferably up to 16 CUs. These specs would not overlap with the RX 7600, while still providing a noticeable upgrade over the previous-gen cards.
Why are budget cards so important?
There is clearly a market for these types of cards for gamers as well. Just look at the Steam Hardware & Software Survey. According to the latest researchThe eighth most popular graphics card is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060, which was released in 2016 and has no AI hardware or ray tracing.
That’s only because it balances an incredible price point with enough power to handle most of the best PC games out there. Later cards may have come with more bells and whistles, but lacked a significant enough performance upgrade to entice users to make the switch. But if the RX 7300 and 7400 really do exist with far more power than the 1060 and cost less than $200, you’ve got an absolute winning combination that should appeal to almost any gamer.