AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Rumored To Be A 24GB VRAM Beast Eyeing The RTX 4090

We've had some pretty big hardware launches over the last few weeks, but we're not done yet. Up next on November 3rd are AMD's third generation of Radeon cards based on its RDNA architecture. The Radeon RX 7000 series will be AMD's first go at "disaggregated" GPUs, to use the Intel terminology. The Red Team's made some pretty bombastic claims about its next GPU architecture, and according to the latest rumors, the flagship will bring back the "XTX" nomenclature from days long past.

Let's start from the beginning: a rumor was going around the web on Friday stating that AMD's flagship GPU would be the Radeon RX 7900 XT. That card would be based on the Navi 31 GPU, and would likely end up with 10,752 shaders out of a possible 12,288 on the Navi 31 GCD. It would also come with just five Memory and Cache Dice (MCDs) instead of six, giving it a 320-bit memory bus and 20GB of GDDR6 memory.


Apparently, that's not exactly the case, at least according to the latest report from Taiwanese leakers Benchlife. Purportedly, AMD will also reveal a true flagship product with a fully-enabled Navi 31 GPU bearing the complete complement of 12,288 shaders and six MCDs, yielding 24GB of GDDR6. Such a card will supposedly be called the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which seems like a pretty small naming difference for such a big gap in specifications. Perhaps AMD is reading from NVIDIA's playbook.

The last "XTX" card was the Radeon X1950 XTX back in 2006. That card was the top end of the top-end at the time, handily outperforming the GeForce 7900 GTX. However, there don't seem to be any rumors about any other RDNA 3 Radeon cards being revealed on November 3rd. It appears that the event might be limited to the two "7900" cards. While disappointing, it lines up with leaks that stated that Navi 32, the chip expected to power the Radeon RX 7800 series, has been delayed.

If that's the case, then it's possible we'll have to wait until next year before we see more midrange Radeon cards. Just as NVIDIA is struggling to sell its stockpile of previous-generation product, so AMD likewise has a bunch of RDNA 2 boards to move which are aggressively priced accordingly.


Another interesting rumor regarding AMD's upcoming cards concerns the concerning 12VHPWR connector. More accurately, it's about the lack of such connector. According to Hard|OCP's Kyle Bennett, neither the Navi 31 reference cards nor any AIB models of the Radeon RX 7900 XT or XTX are using the new 12-pin power connector, and will instead stick to regular old PCIe 8-pin connectors.

How many of those plugs the cards will require is anyone's guess, though. Rumors have put AMD's next big GPUs at around 450 watts, similar to the GeForce RTX 4090. AMD itself has stated that GPUs will have to scale to 700 watts by 2025. With the gains from process shrinks slowing, it only follows that power has to go up for performance to continue to grow.