The Navi 48 & 44 GPUs which are likely to power AMD Radeon RX 8000 graphics cards are unlikely to release this year and could start releasing earlier next year.
About one and a half year ago, AMD announced it’s Radeon RX 7000 series of graphics cards, starting with RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT. It was followed up with the release of RX 7900 GRE, RX 7800 XT, RX 7700 XT, RX 7600 XT & RX 7600.
All these graphics cards were powered by different versions of three different GPUs, namely Navi 31, Navi 32 and Navi 33.
The major problem that AMD Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards faced what that it’s flagship graphics card RX 7900 XTX couldn’t match Nvidia’s flagship, the GeForce RTX 4090, in performance. In fact, it could only match or beat RTX 4080, both in performance and pricing.
The performance parity has become so big that it’s possible that AMD has gone back to the drawing board. It possibly requires a complete overhaul or improvement of it’s GPU architecture. Such things take time.
That’s possibly why, rumors suggest that AMD Radeon RX 8000 series of graphics cards will not come with flagship models. Namely, it will have just two GPUs, Navi 48 and Navi 44. While Navi 48 will target the upper mid-range, Navi 44 is likely to target budget or lower.
If that’s not enough, the RX 8000 series of graphics cards aren’t going to come with faster GDDR7 VRAM either. They are rumored to stick to the GDDR6 VRAM for the RX 8000 series. GDDR6 is the same slower VRAM which powers the RX 7000 graphics cards.
New rumors suggest that RX 8000 graphics are going to release only next year.
RX 8000 Coming Next Year
One of the most well known leakers, @Kepler_L2, has shared a new rumor about the Navi 4x GPUs (via VideoCardz).
In his tweet, Kepler has said that Navi 48, which is likely targeting upper mid-range, is coming only in January 2025. If that isn’t enough, Navi 44, which is likely targeting lower range, is coming even later, in Q2 of 2025.
The delayed release of these GPUs means that AMD RX 8000 isn’t going to come as sooner as we thought.
Conclusion
This delay could cause AMD’s graphics card’s market share to decrease even further. Nvidia dominates the GPU market, both in mid-range and flagship range. This is despite the fact that Nvidia RTX 4000 series has been very lackluster when it comes to performance improvements.
So everyone thought that AMD could speed up the RX 8000 release to get back some of the market share. After all, it’s easier to release cheaper GPUs in market quickly rather than release a completely redesigned (just a speculation) flagship GPU.
We couldn’t understand why AMD is doing this, though. Is AMD waiting for Nvidia to announce its RTX 5000 series first. That doesn’t make sense as while Nvidia is going to launch RTX 5000 later this year or earlier next year, it’s not going to release mid-range any soon. AMD RX 8000 is targeting only mid and lower-range.
There’s also a possibility that because AMD RX 7000 hasn’t sold that much, AMD could have a lot of Navi 3x GPUs lying around in stock. AMD could want to clear all the mid-range stock before it releases newer RX 8000 graphics cards.
Whatever reason it may have, AMD’s graphics sector certainly needs to do better and compete more.
