AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 Series is hugely popular, offering great performance gains compared to earlier graphics cards and allowing it to compete more directly with the Nvidia RTX 30 Series. Despite the fact that the RX 6000 Series is still selling well, AMD is hard at work on the next-gen Radeon RX 7000 Series behind closed doors.
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We outline all there is to know about the AMD Radeon RX 7000 Series right here, including release date and pricing speculation alongside all the latest RDNA 3-themed leaks.
When will the AMD Radeon RX 7000 Series be released?
While many assumed that AMD would follow its yearly release schedule for the next-gen Radeon RX 7000 Series with a reveal in late 2021, but as we now know, that wasn’t the case. In fact, sources suggest that the company isn’t expected to make an announcement until sometime in Q4 2022.
The rumour comes from Twitter leaker @Broly_X1 who has a decent track record and also correctly predicted the three main talking points at AMD’s Computex 2021 keynote last year. The leaker suggests in a now-deleted tweet that AMD is aiming for a Q4 2022 launch, and suggests that AMD’s Ryzen 7000 chipset will launch “around the same time”.
In a January 2022 earnings call, CEO Dr. Lisa Su provided investors with an insight into how development is going. Dr. Su says the company is looking forward to a strong year as “we ramp our current products and launch our next wave of Zen 4 CPUs and RDNA 3 GPUs”.
Not much more was said officially until mid-September 2022, when AMD revealed its next-gen RDNA 3 architecture would be revealed on 3 November 2022, with more details to follow “soon”.
That was followed up by a press release in late October, confirming that the company is set to unveil the “AMD RDNA 3 Graphics Generation” at the event, which is scheduled to start at 1pm PDT/4pm EDT/8pm GMT on 3 November 2022. The event will give insight into the company’s new RDNA 3 architecture that will “deliver new levels of performance, efficiency and functionality to gamers”, and it’ll be streamed both via the AMD website and YouTube for those that want to follow along live.
Given the fact that the Nvidia RTX 4080 is set to be released less than two weeks following the event, on 16 November 2022, it’d be an excellent time for AMD to reveal its competitor.
How much will the AMD Radeon RX 7000 Series cost?
When it comes to potential pricing of the upcoming range, things get a little more complicated, with signs pointing towards a potential increase in cost across the entire RX 7000 Series.
In previous years, AMD has tried to price its GPU range competitively in a bid to tempt consumers away from Nvidia, arguably the dominating force in the GPU market in recent years.
But factors including a shortage of components, increased demand and the fact that some eager fans are paying double or even triple the MSRP of graphics cards just to get their hands on them means that AMD could hike prices up the next time around.
That’s backed up by Twitter leaker @Kepler_L2, who suggests in a tweet that the top-end next-gen Radeon RX 7900 XT could cost as much as $2000, representing a whopping 100% increase compared to the $999 Radeon RX 6900 XT available right now. It’ll likely not be this dramatic – at least across the entire range, as that’d make the entry-level GPU around $960 – but it does suggest that next-gen graphics cards from both AMD and Nvidia could cost more than consumers are used to.
Other reports suggest a not-so-dramatic increase, with Digitimes suggesting a 20% increase due to higher prices for the components needed for the GPU.
What to expect from the AMD Radeon RX 7000 Series
While rumours have been swirling for some time, AMD itself has started to tease specs and standout features of its RDNA 3 architecture and the graphics cards that utilise it. It all started with an AMD blog post in mid-September, shedding light on how it plans on achieving even higher levels of gaming performance.
RDNA 3 architecture
A big part of the Radeon RX 6000 Series was the RDNA 2 architecture it was built on – it was so popular, in fact, that it’s also used on both the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. It was lovingly referred to as Big Navi by fans and Navi 2x by execs, and it seems the Navi name lives on with the next-gen kit.
Twitter leaker @KittyYYuko suggests the next-gen RDNA 3 architecture that’ll be used in the RX 7000 Series is being referred to internally as Navi 33.
The leaker suggests that the RDNA 3 architecture will offer the same raw performance of RDNA 2 with an additional boost from the company’s “next generation IP core”. It aligns with early comments from AMD execs suggesting huge performance improvements from the RDNA 3 architecture, though no exact figures were provided.
The RDNA 3 architecture was officially confirmed by AMD in September 2022, with more details set to come at an event scheduled for early November 2022. Also as rumoured, the company confirmed that the next-gen GPUs will have a chiplet design – something not commonly found in GPUs, but tech that AMD uses in its Ryzen processors.
It’s essentially the secret formula behind AMD’s significant CPU gains in the past few years, so there’s hope that it could have an equally transformative experience on the graphics card front.
Performance boost
AMD has confirmed that its RDNA 3-enabled graphics cards will make the transition from a 7nm process to a 5nm process on the next-gen graphics cards range, which has led some to speculate that could translate to a 2.5x jump in overall performance, and it could allow for better ray-tracing performance too.
AMD has also confirmed that performance-per-watt improvement is a “big focus” for the next-gen Radeon cards. In a blog post released in mid-September, AMD revealed that the new graphics cards are much more efficient than their predecessors, with up to 123% more FPS per Watt than “competing cards” – though that’s unclear whether that’s benchmarked against Nvidia’s RTX 30 Series or the rumoured 40 Series.
Regardless, AMD claims that the combination of its chiplet design, 5nm process and next-gen AMD Infinity Cache tech should lead to an estimated 50% performance-per-watt improvement over the RDNA 2-enabled RX 6000 Series graphics cards available right now.
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