The next generation of AMD Radeon GPUs apparently won’t be out this year, as previously thought, with the latest rumor stating that the company’s new RDNA 4 GPUs, such as the Radeon RX 8900 XT, won’t be out until 2025. If this is true, that means Nvidia would have the holiday season to itself if it does indeed launch the GeForce RTX 5090 at the end of 2024.
So far, two AMD RDNA 4 GPUs have appeared in various bits of documentation. They are the top-end AMD Navi 48 and mid-range Navi 44. However, several previous rumors have also pointed to AMD focusing on the $500-600 part of the GPU market with this launch, and leaving Nvidia to take the best graphics card crown with the RTX 5090 at the top end.
This latest rumor comes from tech leaker Kepler_L2 on X, formerly Twitter, who was asked whether we were likely to see RDNA 4 in 2024. In a reply, they simply stated “CES”, referring to the Consumer Electronics Show, which kicks off on January 7, 2025.
Not only that, but Kepler_L2 also followed up with a second post stating that only Navi 48 would be launched at CES, with the cheaper Navi 44 GPU “probably” not turning up until Q2, meaning the second quarter of 2025, spanning from April to June.
Of course, none of this has been confirmed by AMD, so take it with a pinch of salt for the moment. However, Kepler_L2 has hit the nail on the head with some previous AMD GPU leaks, including rightly stating that the company’s Navi 33 GPU would be equipped with a 128-bit bus and 8GB of memory as standard in July 2022, nearly a year before the Navi 33-based Radeon RX 7600 eventually came out with these exact specs. In the same month, Kepler_L2 also correctly stated that Navi 33 would be used in the Radeon RX 7600 XT, and not the Radeon RX 7700 XT.
Very little official concrete information is known about AMD’s new RDNA 4 GPUs yet, but rumors currently point to there being a Navi 48 SKU called the Radeon RX 8900 XTX, with all of the new graphics cards reportedly still using GDDR6 VRAM, rather than the new GDDR7 standard. Another leak also claimed that AMD ray tracing performance is going to be “completely different” on these new GPUs compared to its current lineup.
While AMD has largely nailed basic gaming performance on its GPUs over the last three generations, it’s struggled to compete with Nvidia’s pace when it comes to new features, such as ray tracing and AI. We may have AMD FSR 3.1 now, but it’s only supported in a fraction of games compared to DLSS, and it still doesn’t use the matrix AI cores inside AMD’s current GPUs, such as the Radeon RX 7800 XT.
If you’re looking to pick up a new graphics card before 2025, our current pick of AMD’s lineup is the Radeon RX 7900 GRE, which offers incredible performance for its mid-range price tag.