NVIDIA’s next-gen Blackwell GPUs may have a relatively easy time in the enthusiast segments. According to Kepler_L2, a reliable tipster from Twitter, AMD’s RDNA 4 GPUs won’t consist of higher-end products, giving the GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 free reigns over the lucrative top-end market. The source believes the Radeon RX 8000 lineup will comprise budget and midrange SKUs, much like the Radeon 5000 stack.
Updated: According to All_The_Watts, Navi 43 and 44 are the only surviving RDNA 4 GPUs, indicating that Navi 41 and 42 have been scrapped. This would imply that we won’t see the successor to Navi 31 and 32, or in marketing terms, the Radeon RX 7900 and 7800 series cards.
The reason behind this alleged move is unclear. One could argue that RDNA 3’s poor performance and target misses forced AMD to revamp its graphics architecture to better compete with NVIDIA’s GeForce offerings. Like RDNA 1, the first step in this approach would only include budget, monolithic GPUs with small dies.
As for a potential RDNA 3.5 refresh, there’s no news on that front either. All evidence points to it being a mid-generation refresh designed for integrated graphics solutions powering notebooks and handhelds. The Ryzen 8000 family (CPUs and APUs) will be one of the primary benefactors of this refresh.
Officially, AMD claims even higher-performing products from the next generation of RDNA 4 GPUs. But if history is anything to go by, the marketing and engineering teams are usually disjointed.
