It’s been a glorious grace period unlike any other in the PC hardware universe. We’ve seen powerful new CPU architectures from both Intel and AMD within weeks of each other. We witnessed the launch of the unabashedly powerful RTX 40-series. It’s been an exciting time to be a PC gamer.
Now there’s just one more highly anticipated arrival that will effectively wrap up the party: AMD’s next-gen GPUs. These will be something truly special: the first chiplet-based GPUs for consumers. The 7900X was an obvious product, but the existence of a second, more powerful GPU is the big news here. AMD seems to be following Nvidia’s strategy of launching two high-end cards first. As you may recall, Nvidia previously “unlaunched” the third 40-series GPU.
Recent rumors indicate that AMD will launch the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT this week. Yes, that’s a lot of Xs. It surprisingly brings back the XTX moniker, which it hasn’t used since 2006 for the X1900 XTX. Both GPUs will apparently take the RTX 4090 at the top of the stack for RDNA3. Both GPUs will be Navi31, which is the big die in the family. The XTX version will be the full version of the chip, the XT version being slightly cut-down. The flagship should come with 24GB of 20Gb/s memory on a 384-bit memory bus, which is in line with previous rumours. This should give it about a terabyte of memory bandwidth. This number does not include its infinite cache benefits.
This fan-made render of the flagship Navi31 GPU looks stunning. (Photo: @technetium)
According to TechSpot, this time it is expected to offer up to 96MB of cache. This is a small reduction from the 128MB offered on the 6900 XT. However, it can use its V-Cache technology to stack things vertically. It was previously rumored that it might offer as much as 384MB, which would be really nuts. The XTX card is said to have 12,288 streaming processors. That’s more than double the 5,120 found in the previous flagship; Radeon RX 6900 XT. Its energy consumption is still a big unknown here. Previously AMD said it would move up this generation. Since the 6900 XT was a 300W card, we can comfortably predict that it will be 375W or more.
The cut-down XT version will use 20GB of GDDR6 memory across a narrower 320-bit bus. It will reportedly offer 800GB of memory bandwidth, which is more than the RTX 4080’s 16GB, not accounting for the Infinity cache benefit. This card may land among Nvidia’s top GPUs, though. It will offer 10,752 stream processors, more than double the 6800 XT’s 4,680.
Notably, neither GPU will use the new 12VHPWR connector. Instead, it uses the tried-and-true eight- and six-pin connectors we all have now. This will come as good news for those who follow GPU news. Nvidia is currently embroiled in a controversy over melting its 4-in-1 PCIe power adapter. This is believed to be caused by a suboptimal soldering job on the wires inside the plug entering the card. Due to the hullabaloo, an AMD executive confirmed on Twitter that it is not using a 12-pin connector.
Sadly, we must inform you that although AMD is announcing these GPUs on November 3, it may take another month for them to reach retail markets. Noted tipster Greymon55 recently posted That they won’t sell until December. They were originally supposed to be offered in late November, two weeks after the release. Pricing and board availability are still TBD, but we’ll find out soon.
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