AMD to announce its new graphics cards at Gamescom
Just a few days from now.
AMD is set to unveil new Radeon graphics cards during a Gamescom press conference scheduled for August 25 at 17:00 local time. Though the exact products to be announced weren't disclosed, it's pretty safe to say that when Scott Herkelman, the general manager of AMD's graphics business teases "major product announcements", we'll be seeing the long awaited RX 7800 XT and/or RX 7700 XT.
AMD is about to fill a major gap in its lineup. Following the release of the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT in December of 2022, things have been quiet on the Radeon front. The much cheaper RX 7600 was launched in May, but curiously, the huge gap between the two RX 7900s and RX 7600 has remained wide open. That's all set to change.
Please join the @AMDRadeon team at Gamescom next week for our next major product announcements! If you can make it to Germany and will be one of the couple hundred of thousand visitors attending one of the biggest gaming events I hope to talk to you in person!… pic.twitter.com/Te7l7ufU59August 16, 2023
It wasn't too long ago that AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su said AMD was on track to launch "enthusiast-class" graphics cards before the end of October. But then PowerColor jumped the gun and posted the complete product page for its Red Devil Radeon RX 7800 XT, with specifications and pictures. That page was quickly taken down, and someone at PowerColor surely got detention that day, if not worse.
The RX 7800 XT is expected to go against Nvidia's RTX 4070 cards. Thanks to PowerColor's leak, we know the card features 3840 shader units and 16GB of GDDR6 connected to a 256-bit memory bus. That puts it just about right in the middle of the RX 7900 XT and RX 7600's specs. We'll have to wait a little longer to see how it performs, though.
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Details on the RX 7700 XT are scarcer. It's presumably an RX 4060 Ti competitor and I'm going to assume it uses a cut-down version of the RX 7800 XT's Navi 32 GPU. 12GB of VRAM and a 192-bit bus would seem likely.
In the end it will all come down to how the cards are priced. They don't have to beat Nvidia's competitors if they have attractive prices, but AMD will be hoping the RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 will be competitive by all measures.
We won't have long to find out. August 25 is just a week away, and that means reviews will most likely follow in September.