It looks as though AMD’s next-gen Radeon cards could offer a huge step up for gamers in performance. Reports suggest that the rumored next-gen flagship AMD Radeon RX 8800 XT graphics card might even match the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 in ray tracing performance.
If this proves to be true, it would be a big win for AMD, which recently announced it was abandoning high-end Radeon GPUs entirely. Plans or not, a card that can level with an RTX 4080 is a powerful one indeed, and could upend the best graphics card market with a genuine competitor after years of Nvidia’s near-total dominance.
This information has been leaked via Chiphell board user zhangzhonghao, a regular tech leaker with a strong track record for leaking AMD news, including the 9800X3D announcement date. In this new leak, zhangzhonghao provides some exciting rumors about this new, next-gen RDNA 4 Radeon flagship GPU.
Zhangzhongzhao suggests that this RX 8800 XT card, which according to the Chiphell post title may or may not be its final name, will consume 25% less power compared to earlier AMD Radeon 7900XTX cards, putting its total board power at around 270W.
The Chiphell forum user also suggests that ray tracing benchmarks during Resident Evil 7 Biohazard show a performance gain of 45% over the 7900XTX. Previous rumors have already pointed to better RNDA4 ray tracing performance, thanks to an entirely new ray tracing engine – this benchmark figure would seem to suggest that those efforts haven’t been wasted.
According to the Chiphell post, this new Radeon card will begin mass production in mid-December, which could mean a launch as early as January 2025. This would put this card in direct competition with Nvidia’s next-gen RTX 5000 series, which is expected to be announced at the CES 2025 trade show in the first week of January.
None of this information has been confirmed by AMD, of course, but if it holds up to scrutiny, it means that the battle for the mid-tier GPU market could be hotter next time around. While this rumored new AMD GPU isn’t going to threaten a top-end card such as the RTX 5090, it could give the RTX 5070, and perhaps even the RTX 5080, a hard time if AMD gets the pricing right.
While it hasn’t found the winning ticket in the GPU market recently, AMD has been on fire in the CPU market, and Intel simply hasn’t found an answer for AMD’s efforts with its latest chips. Check out our AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D review to hear our thoughts about the best gaming CPU, while you wait for 9800X3D stock levels to improve.