Intel’s and AMD’s best graphics cards are still fresh off the press, but both companies are already hard at work on their next-gen GPUs … or, in some cases, next-next gen. Recently, leakers spotted references to upcoming GPU architectures in both AMD and Intel code updates, showing that the development is well underway.
Let’s start with AMD. The company has only just recently launched the excellent RX 9070 XT and RX 9070, and the RX 9060 XT is said to follow shortly, with a rumored announcement coming up soon at Computex. This generation is highly unlikely (and by highly unlikely I mean nearly impossible at this point) to deliver any more high-end products, but we might see other models of RDNA 4 making an appearance. The RX 9070 GRE could see a global release at some point, and the RX 9060 non-XT is almost a given.
Once RDNA 4 is wrapped up, we’re going to be waiting for RDNA 5, also referred to as UDNA or NAVI 5, which is presumably known as GFX13 (as RDNA 4 was known as GFX12). As spotted by Kepler_L2 on X (Twitter) and first shared by VideoCardz, GFX13 just made what could be its first appearance in AMD patch code. The more interesting tidbit is the “ENABLE_WAVEGROUP” definition, which is new to RDNA. When prompted about it, Kepler_L2 responded: “I think it’s related to SWC (Streaming Wave Coalescer /pseudo out-of-order execution). Each SIMD takes multiple wave32/wave64 (a wavegroup) as inputs and reorders the the work items of each wave to reduce execution divergence.”
While AMD sat out of the high-end GPU race with RDNA 4, most reports claim that it’ll be back with a vengeance with RDNA 5. Considering that we’re expecting a halo card that will at least aim to rival Nvidia, AMD will surely introduce some architectural changes to support that.
In the case of Intel, we already know that the next-gen cards will be called Arc Celestial, and Intel itself has confirmed that most of its team is now working on Celestial. Coming up next will be Intel Arc Druid, which, given the various delays that plagued Alchemist and the small amount of GPUs launched in Battlemage (we could still get more, though), seemed like a long shot. However, another Twitter leaker spotted references to Intel Xe4 (Druid) in Intel’s open-source library patches. While this doesn’t mean that Druid GPUs are right around the corner (they’re not), it does mean that Intel is already working on them, which bodes well.
