More rumors about the next big AMD Radeon GPU launch are circling, and they're again pointing to AMD abandoning the top end of the gaming graphics card market with its forthcoming RDNA 4 architecture. In fact, according to this latest leak, not only is AMD's new GPU not coming out until 2025, but it also won't be as fast as AMD's current flagship, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX.
That's not necessarily a massive problem for AMD, if it can get the pricing right. Assuming this card is priced at around the $500 mark, and it improves on AMD's currently lagging ray tracing performance, while beating whatever GPU Nvidia has in this price range at launch, this could be one of the best graphics cards, but it will be a delicate balance.
This latest bit of gossip comes from top tech leaker Kepler_L2, who has just posted some information purportedly about RDNA 4's ray tracing capabilities in a post on X (formerly Twitter). We'll come onto those changes in a second, but what also stood out to us was Kepler_L2's follow-up statement, when asked when RDNA 4 was coming out, and if the strongest RDNA 4 GPU would be equal to a new Nvidia RTX 5080 when it comes out.
In response, Kepler_L2 replied, "Early next year. It will be at most in between 7900 XT and XTX." If this rumor is true, and refers to the general performance of AMD GPUs, then AMD isn't even planning to beat its current flagship, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which will be two years old by the time we get to early 2025. In fact, if this leak is on the money, the top-end RDNA 4 GPU will only be a bit quicker than the Radeon RX 7900 XT, which currently goes for around $699.
Previous rumors have pointed to AMD aiming to offer RTX 4080 performance for half the price, and this card could potentially do that. In our Radeon RX 7900 XT review, we found this AMD GPU could keep up with the more expensive RTX 4080 in several game tests, and even beat it in Hitman 3. However, it couldn't compete with the RTX 4080 when it came to ray tracing, and AMD FSR 3.1 frame-gen tech still isn't supported in as many games as Nvidia DLSS 3.
If AMD can improve its architecture's ray tracing performance, though, then it could potentially be onto a winner here, and that's what's implied by Kepler_L2's original post. The leak details several new ray tracing features reportedly found in RDNA 4, but it only includes the names of the features, with no details on how they're expected to work. We've listed these below:
- Double ray tracing intersect engine
- RT instance node transform
- 64B (bytes) RT node
- Ray tracing tri-pair optimization
- Change flags encoded in barycentrics to simplify detection of procedural nodes
- BVH (bounding volume hierarchy) footprint improvement
- RT support for OBB (oriented bounding box) instance node intersection
All of which might sound a bit intimidating if you haven't read several whitepapers on ray tracing, but the general gist is that AMD is reportedly introducing a number of new features that mean ray tracing is handled differently in RDNA 4 than RDNA 3. In particular, the performance of ray intersection and ray-triangle intersection calculations looks set to be improved, and the new GPUs should be faster and more efficient at handling geometry for ray tracing as well.
There's only so much you can glean from a list of technical features, though. The real proof will be when we get a chance to benchmark this GPU in ray-traced games and see how it performs. AMD's ray tracing performance has improved significantly with RDNA 3 over RDNA 2, but its current GPUs are still behind Nvidia's equivalents, particularly when it comes to games such as Cyberpunk 2077 with its path tracing mode.
It looks as though we're going to have to wait until 2025 for this new GPU now, and there are rumors of RTX 5090 delays as well. If you're looking for a new AMD card in the meantime, check out our Radeon RX 7900 GRE review, as this mid-range GPU offers great performance for the money.
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