According to a new report, AMD may be working on a graphics card that offers the same performance as the Nvidia RTX 4080 but at only half the price. This isn’t the first time these rumors cropped up either, with a report back in 2023 about the manufacturer focusing on the mid-range market.
The latest report asserts that the mid-range options of the AMD Radeon 8000 series will allegedly cost between $400-600 (around £315-£472 / AU$606-AU$910), according to PCGamesN. This is a huge price cut on its own but becomes a downright steal when compared to the MSRP of the RTX 4080. And in a graphics card generation that’s already suffering from a severe lack of affordable options, the possibility of AMD pushing out a card so powerful and budget-friendly is an excellent way to appease a significant market while standing out from its competition.
There are also rumors that this level of performance for the AMD Radeon 8000 will max out here, leaving the high-end graphics cards to Nvidia in the next generation. While it sounds like a poor decision, it’s a strategy that makes sense for the manufacturer, since this would leave AMD to focus development on its mid-range and lower-end options instead.
It’s also important to note that AMD has been struggling against Nvidia in terms of ray-tracing options in its graphics cards. Team Green also has the advantage of its DLSS 3 versus Team Red’s FSR 3, which is upscaling tech that takes a lower resolution frame and upscales the resolution to a higher one (so 1080p to 4K) so they are quicker to render, boosting frame rates. It should be noted though that this advantage is narrowing.
According to YouTube leaker Moore’s Law is Dead, AMD had a high-end Radeon RX 8000 graphics card, codenamed Navi 4C. A diagram shown in the video asserts that the card features three “Shader Engine Dies” placed on top of each “Active Interposer die,” and a “Multimedia and I/O Die” – which would have resulted in a card with nine separate Shader Engine Dies.
But it seems that this high-end card wasn’t fated to be, as the card could have demonstrated top-tier performance but at an extremely expensive price point. We’re talking possibly $2,500. And considering that AMD still struggles with ray tracing, that asking price would be a tall order for a market that already is balking at expensive components.