Hopes are high for AMD RDNA 4, as most current generation graphics cards from team red offer fantastic performance and value. However, in a strange turn of events, it appears that AMD may be planning to skip manufacturing any high-end Radeon GPUs built on the microarchitecture altogether.
This news comes from hardware leaker Kepler_L2, who claims to have spoken to three sources that suggest AMD RDNA 4 pixel pushers will only target the midrange and budget markets.
They also state that RDNA 4 will be similar to “RDNA 1 or Polaris”, referring to the Radeon RX 5000 and RX 500 series. Neither of these GPU generations incoroporated any high-end SKUs, topping out with the $399 5700 XT and $279 RX 590, respectively.
If true, this would leave the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX without a successor (which would be a terrible shame). More worryingly, however, this would leave the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 and other team green graphics cards unchallenged, effectively creating a monopoly.
While AMD may be retreating from the enthusiast GPU space, it’s living it up in the CPU market with the likes of the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. As such, we fully expect it to continue finding a place on our best gaming CPU list when it launches Zen 5 processors.