The existence of two new AMD Radeon gaming GPUs has just been inadvertently confirmed by the company, and they look like they will be based on the company’s forthcoming RDNA 4 architecture. Current rumors point to AMD leaving the high end of the graphics card market to Nvidia with this generation, and focusing on mid-range performance instead.
Although several of the latest AMD GPUs are featured in our best graphics card guide, the company has had to price them very aggressively to compete with Nvidia. AMD’s current RDNA 3 GPUs are great when it comes to straightforward rasterization performance, but Nvidia’s competitors are much faster at ray tracing, and also have the benefit of widespread support for the company’s DLSS upscaling and frame generation technologies.
Back to these new GPUs, two Navi codenames have appeared on the Github for AMD’s open-source ROCm AI software stack, and they both start with the number 4. In case you’re not up on your AMD GPU jargon, the company currently uses “Navi” as the overall codename for its GPUs, which will usually be used in several different graphics cards, with some of the parts disabled on the cheaper models.
First up is Navi44, which comes straight after Navi33 and Phoenix, with the name “gfx1200.” That’s then followed by Navi48, with the name “gfx1201.” Given that, RDNA 3 chips used the Navi3x code name, and “gfx11xx” model name series, and RDNA 2 chips were Navi2x and gfx10xx, we’re almost certain that Navi44 and Navi48 are indeed new RDNA 4 GPUs.
The listings were spotted by tech leaker Kepler_L2, who followed up with a post to confirm that the numbers in the “gfx” model names referred to the “order of development” rather than the size or power of the chips. We’ve seen “gfx1200” mooted as an RDNA 4 GPU name before, but this is the first time we’ve seen it married up with an actual Navi GPU.
This is the first time we’ve seen Navi48 and Navi44 in official AMD documentation together, but leaks have been circulating about their specs for a while. According to the latest leaks, the AMD Navi48 specs include 64 compute units, a 256-bit memory bus, and a 2,770MHz clock speed. If the RDNA 4 architecture follows a similar compute unit structure to RDNA 2 and RDNA 2, that would give a fully-enabled Navi48 chip 4,096 stream processors.
Meanwhile, Navi44 is expected to have half the number of compute units, potentially meaning it has 2,048 stream processors, along with a 128-bit memory bus and 2,515MHz clock speed. Although AMD is expected to leave the high end to Nvidia in this generation, rumors point to AMD ray tracing improving with RDNA 4. Of course, none of these specs have been confirmed by AMD, so take them with a pinch of salt for the moment, but we do now know that Navi44 and Navi48 are definitely coming.
The AMD RDNA 4 release date is expected to arrive before the end of 2024, and it’s possible we may even find out a few details at Computex in June. In the meantime, if you’re interested in AMD’s GPU lineup, check out our new Radeon RX 7900 GRE review, where we put this new mid-range champion through its paces.