AMD RDNA 3 - Release date, price, specs, and more

AMD RDNA 3, a new architecture for AMD's graphics processors, has arrived and we've rounded up everything we know about the release date, plus what price and performance they bring with it.

AMD RDNA 3 is certainly a huge topic of discussion, alongside all things AMD Radeon RX 7000.

AMD released a blog post the day before NVIDIA's Ada Lovelace "Geforce Beyond" broadcast hinting that their RDNA 3 GPUs will be more powerful than the RTX 4000 series, which, if true, could be very exciting news indeed.

Alongside these recent announcements from AMD, here are some further nuggets of information that left us even more hungry for their release, so let's take a look at everything we discovered before they officially launched.

AMD RDNA 3 Release Date

AMD's brand new premiere livestream confirmed not only that 4 new RX 7000 GPUs are going to be available from September 27th, but also that RDNA 3 will be launched later this year.

We eventually had some further official confirmation, as Scott Herkelman, the SVP and GM of AMD tweeted that November 3rd would be the official announcement date for RDNA 3.

Indeed a livestream did take place announcing the release date for their first RDNA 3 graphics cards: the RX7900 XTX and RX7900XT. Both cards have now officially been released, as of the 13th of December.

There were many rumours flying around before this, though.

One tweet from reliable leaker greymon55 initially suggested that we may be seeing the first RDNA 3 cards as early as this September.

However, in another leak, Greymon55 suggested an October/November launch.

AMD themselves announced an unveiling livestream of their RX 7000 series on the 29th of August, only days before Greymon's September prediction.

Greymon55 also noted that Navi 31 may launch as soon as late October, which was in line with those previous suggestions, and also means that AMD could be set to launch both a new round of GPUs and CPUs within a matter of weeks of each other, which could be huge for the market.

According to Seeking Alpha, during AMD's Q2 2021 earnings call, they mentioned that they 'remain on track to launch next generation products in 2022, including our Zen 4 processors built with industry-leading 5-nanometer process technology and our RDNA 3 GPUs'.

Read More: RTX 4000 - Latest Leaks, News, and More

An earnings call from Lisa Su (via The Motley Fool) highlighted that AMD would be on track to release the RDNA 3 cards 'later this year', which lines up in part with previous rumours noting a release later in 2022.

Elsewhere, prominent hardware leaker Kepler_L2 noted that the RDNA 3-based SoCs were allegedly having their drivers enabled in Linux, as per some patch notes that reference GFX11 (believed to be RDNA 3, given GFX10 refers to RDNA 2). This is a key example of prep work that AMD likely did to prepare their GPUs for an autumn release.

AMD RDNA 3 Price

It's been announced that the RX 7900 XTX will cost $999, while the XT will be $100 less at $899.

This is significantly more than the previous generation of graphics cards are currently being sold for. The 6950 XT, which is the top-spec card, costs $849 and the 6900 XT is going for $679.

But, considering the supposed performance boost that the RDNA 3 architecture will offer, it makes sense that there would be such a hike in price.

AMD RDNA 3 Specs

We don't know much about what to expect with AMD RDNA 3, but there is a little bit of confirmed information and a few leaks that could point us in the right direction.

Let's start with what we do know; during AMD's recent 7000 series unveiling CEO of AMD Lisa Su threw us a bone and told us just a little about the RDNA 3 series, and mentioned that it's about 50% more watt/power efficient than the RDNA 2 series and that the cache size for compute units and shader arrays will be doubled.

There have been two leaked images on Twitter by @9550pro which appear to show an AMD RX 7000 Series graphics card. If this is the case, then it sure looks pretty spectacular and will be bigger than AMD's existing RX 6900.

Reliable leaker Greymon55 noted that the flagship Navi 31 GPU, the Radeon RX 7900 XT may well see a clock speed of 3GHz and 100 teraflops of performance, which would make it rather powerful indeed.

One of the most recent leaks comes from YouTuber Moore's Law Is Dead, who shares details around the Mid-Tier Radeon RDNA 3 GPUs.

According to the video, they claim that the GPUs which use Navi 33 will offer rasterization performance in practically in line with the RX 6900 XT.

Read More: Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs: Everything We Know So Far

On top of this, they will apparently come with a memory bandwidth of 18Gbps and 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM.

This sort of matches up to what @greymon55 suggested (and guessed) a while back, with their breakdown of what to expect for Navi 31, 32 and 33.

According to @greymon55, Navi 31 will have 60WGP, 16GB 256bit GDDR6, 256M 3D IFC, and 2.5gHz.

Read More: AMD Radeon RX 7000 Series - Everything We Know

Navi 32 is predicted to have 40WGP, 12 HB 192bit GDDR6, 192M 3D IFC, and between 2.6 - 2.8 GHz.

And finally the Navi 33 is said to have 16 WGP, 8GB 128bit GDDR6, 64M IFC, and between 2.8 - 3.0 GHz.

Navi 32 would in turn have 40 workgroup processors, 12GB of GDDR6 on a 192-bit bus, have 192MB of 3D Infinity Cache, and run between 2.6 and 2.8GHz.

Whether this all turns out to be the case, is still yet to be seen, however, there are some that are suggesting that AMD RDNA 3 could see a massive 60% performance improvement over the previous generation.

On the front of performance increases, reliable leaker Kepler_L2 (via WCCFTech) has recently noted that the high-end Radeon RX 7000 chips based on Navi 31 may feature support for PCIe Gen 5.0 x16, which would make them rather speedy indeed, with an alleged support transfer rate of 128GB/s.

With this being said, Greymon55 has recently posted what are purported to be revised core counts for AMD's upcoming Navi 31, 32 and 33 GPUs that actually puts them as being less powerful than initially expected, which is intriguing. Even with these revised core counts, Greymon55 has stated that the performance goals for the RDNA 3 GPUs remain the same as before, and could actually be even higher, which could suggest these cards will be more efficient.

A new leak from RedGamingTech (via NeoWin) has suggested that AMD has upped the TDP for the top end Navi 31 SKU by 8% to 405W from the originally expected 375W, which would make it a beefier and potentially more powerful card. This comes in the wake of leaks suggesting the RTX 4000 series might pack some serious power, so it may be the case AMD is looking to compete fully.

A new leak from Greymon55 suggests that even AMD's lower-end integrated APUs will pack a punch with the so-called 'Phoenix' APU designed for notebooks allegedly being equivalent to an RTX 3060.

Recently, the likes of 3D Center have noted that the Navi 31 may operate as a single GPU as opposed to using a multi-chip module, and revert back to their traditional monolithic design that AMD has always used.

Speaking of Infinity Cache, leaker Kepler_L2 has noted that the top-end Navi 31 card may well have a 384MB Infinity Cache, which would represent a 3x increase on the old RDNA 2 cards that only came with 128MB. Infinity Cache essentially allows AMD to add more bandwidth to the GPU which offers a more efficient method of power by removing memory bottlenecks and offers a quicker 'route' to the GPU as it were.

With reference to cache size, a new leak from Angstronomics (via VideoCardz) has suggested that the top-end Navi 31 will have a 96MB Infinity Cache, and be comprised of one Graphics Chiplet Die (GCD) plus six Memory Chiplet Dies (MCDs). This is all expected to come in a small 5nm processing node, as AMD is going all in on smaller chips that still offer a noticeable increase in power.

Intriguingly, Greymon55 has highlighted that the top end Navi 31 may feature a 384-bit memory bus as opposed to 256-bit. In the real world, this may mean that the card will need fewer memory modules, which could make them cheaper and easier to keep cool.

Those memory bus upgrades aren't just expected to be limited to the top-end Navi 31 GPUs, either, if Greymon55 (via WCCFTech) is to be believed. Navi 32 is also in line for a bus upgrade to 256-bit, complete with 16GB of memory.

A recent leak from Kepler_L2, according to a recent Linux patch, has noted that the RDNA 3 architecture looks to be one of the first to support DisplayPort 2.0 output, which in theory could allow for 16K output at 60Hz.

AMD themselves have recently, and officially, confirmed a huge performance uplift from these RDNA 3-based cards, with the Senior Vice President of Engineering David Wang noting that they will have over 50% more power per watt over the current RDNA 2 GPUs.

In addition, the GPUs will feature a brand new Compute Unit and a new generation of its Infinity Cache, as well as being based on a 5nm processing node.

Speaking of the cards being smaller, a recent leak from Greymon55 has suggested that as well as being on a smaller node, that the actual chip area itself on the top-end Navi 31 cards will be 33% smaller than on its predecessor with a size of 350 square millimetres.

Interestingly, Seasonic, manufacturer of PC PSUs, looks to have accidentally listed the wattage figures for the upcoming GPUs, which look to be the same as the current RX 6000 series (via TweakTown).

For reference, the top-end Radeon RX 7900 XT will require a 750W for the GPU only, with the Radeon RX 7800 XT having the same output, and the Radeon RX 7700 XT requiring 100W less power required.

This could be indicative of the fact that the data inputted for RX 7000 is just a placeholder, or possibly that the cards are aiming to run at the same power output, which would make them more efficient than Nvidia's RTX 4000 series, according to leaks.

Intriguingly, a new leak from Moore's Law Is Dead (via TweakTown) relating to the potential Steam Deck 2 has touted the device as being powered by an AMD RDNA 3-based GPU which may provide over 50% more performance than the current AMD GPU inside, which would make it seriously powerful.

Greymon55 has touted that AMD may be developing an even more powerful card than the current most powerful Navi 31 options, which he has called Navi 3X.

As for specs, they stated the card is expected to come with 8 shader engines and 16,384 stream processors, although according to the leaker, specs are still TBC ahead of a potential 2023 release. It's unclear as to what this card will be put into, or used for, but it may be the case that it forms part of a new Radeon Pro series.

In addition, in a recent interview with Tom's Hardware, AMD's product technology architect Sam Naffziger has been quoted as stating that the rumour about the RDNA 3 cards using a Ryzen-like chiplet design would be a 'reasonable inference'.

In essence, offering a Ryzen-style chiplet design could allow for higher spec GPUs in a more cost-effective manner to offer better bang for the buck as it were. AMD has already seen it work well with their CPUs, so doing it for their GPUs could definitely be a major win.

AMD has also allegedly patched a Github repository that allowed them to add a matrix-based instruction set to RDNA 3, which could let the cards perform AI-based image reconstruction in a similar vein to Nvidia DLSS. Leaker Greymon55 has taken this inclusion to mean that AI acceleration support will be present on the RX 7000 series, although we aren't certain for sure.

A recent addition to a Linux patch (via WCCFTech) has highlighted the point that the new RDNA 3 GPUs may feature an uprated DCN engine to 3.2.1, from the previous 3.0.

Scott Herkelman, AMD Radeon's General Manager, has confirmed in a tweet that the RDNA 3 GPU's will not be using the 12VHPWR power connector, as originally rumoured.

We're excited to see the RDNA 3 architecture for our own eyes! Roll on end of 2022!