New AMD Radeon leak suggests RDNA 4 GPUs may be just what we need

Upcoming GPUs, built using the AMD RDNA 4 microarchitecture, are expected to mark a change of pace for the company with a pronounced focus on the midrange and budget spaces. New leaks detailing potential specs and performance appear to confirm this situation, and gamers could be set to benefit massively.

In the face of stiff competition, the best graphics card that AMD has to offer, balancing price to performance, is the midrange Radeon RX 7800 XT. The company performs well in the budget space too, but its high-end offerings simply don’t compete as well with the best Nvidia has to offer, despite admirable efforts.

Thanks to details shared by All_The_Watts on X, we may now have our first glance at specs for not one, but two, RDNA 4 GPUs. However, this post requires some unpacking, as it stops short of denoting the specs to which each number correlates, but we can make some educated guesses.

Piecing together what we can about the list, it appears that the Navi 48 GPU die will have an area of around 240mm², whereas Navi 44 will be surprisingly small, with an estimated area of 130mm². For context, the smallest and least-powerful die among RDNA 3 graphics cards, Navi 33, is 204 mm².

The rest of the specs list is less clear. However, the most likely configuration is as described in the table above. Oddly, this would leave Navi 48 and Navi 44 with decidedly narrow memory buses, but this constraint could be somewhat alleviated if the GPUs were paired with GDDR7 VRAM.

More excitingly, though, All_The_Watts shares some performance estimations for both GPUs. While the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, here referred to as “Top 31”, will be faster than any Navi 48 graphics cards, the RDNA 4 flagship will outpace the Radeon RX 7900 XT (down 31). However, this could also refer to the Radeon RX 7900 GRE.

Navi 44, meanwhile, is predicted to sit somewhere between Navi 33 and 32, which each power the Radeon RX 7600 and RX 7800 XT, respectively. Curiously, All_The_Watts has chosen to refer to these current generation GPUs by their codenames, Hotpink Bonefish and Wheat, hence the emojis.

With all this in mind, Navi 48 appears to be the half-price RTX 4080 on which AMD is rumored to be working. If true, previously flagship performance could be up for grabs for as little as $500-$600. Whether a graphics card rocking this GPU will be worth buying compared to a discounted current-generation pixel pusher, though, will largely depend on RDNA 4 ray tracing gains. Either way, though, the midrange and budget spaces should now have much better value and affordable graphics cards from which to choose.

We’ll hopefully learn more about RDNA 4 at Computex 2024, in addition to AMD almost certainly revealing details about its upcoming Zen 5 CPUs. Stay tuned for PCGamesN’s coverage of the show’s keynotes and exhibition hall.