After months of silence, it seems that AMD might be readying a new graphics card — but it’s not the one most of us expected to see.
Instead of following the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT with an RX 7800 XT, AMD appears to be moving down a couple of notches. Rumor has it that its next GPU will be the RX 7600.
The latest scoop comes from Igor’s Lab, which claims that some of AMD’s board partners will showcase the Radeon RX 7600 during Computex, which is a little over a month away. However, Igor’s Lab seems convinced that some manufacturers will hold off, so we might only see a few models of the GPU to start with.
AMD itself hasn’t teased any new desktop GPUs in a long time. If the RX 7600 is, indeed, the first GPU to follow December’s launch of the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, that brings up a lot of questions.
AMD has been silent for the past few months while Nvidia has continued to work its way through the RTX 40-series. With the RTX 4090, RTX 4080, RTX 4070 Ti, and RTX 4070, one might say that Nvidia has a fairly full lineup so far, at least as far as the high-end and midrange segments are concerned. It’s also rumored to soon launch the RTX 4060 Ti, with a tentative May release date.
Meanwhile, if AMD jumps from the flagships all the way down to the RX 7600, that leaves several GPUs out of the lineup right now. It could be good for consumers if the RX 7600 is priced competitively, though, because as things stand now, we still don’t have an affordable graphics card in the latest generation. This applies to both AMD and Nvidia. Fortunately, last-gen cards are still worthwhile.
Not much is known about the RX 7600 — most people didn’t expect it to be the only RDNA 3 GPU to make an appearance after such a long break. All that we know is that it will most likely house the Navi 33 GPU. If we assume that the card launches within a month or two of Computex, that means a six-month gap between the RX 7900 XTX and the RX 7600.
AMD makes its name in the market for (among other reasons) being a less expensive alternative to Nvidia’s increasingly crazy pricing strategy. With Team Red’s flagships costing $1,000 and $900, it might be struggling to find a good way to price the midrange GPUs, such as the RX 7800 XT and the RX 7700 XT.
Nvidia, meanwhile, is keeping the prices high in this generation, so there should be some wiggle room for AMD to launch more value-oriented cards. The RX 7600 will have to be cheap in order to steal the spotlight from Nvidia’s RTX 4070 and RTX 4060 Ti.
