AMD’s next Navi graphics card could hit back at Nvidia GeForce RTX 30-series

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AMD’s next Navi GPU could be stupidly powerful — watch out, Nvidia

Next AMD Radeon RX GPU could be a powerhouse
(Image credit: AMD)

It’s still stupidly difficult to find where to buy the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT or any other new Navi-based graphics card, but that’s not stopped leaks around future AMD GPUs from popping up. 

Specifically, a mix of tipsters and leakers have claimed the flagship “Navi 31” GPU could have 15,360 cores, as reported by VideoCardz. That’s three times the core count of the high-end AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT, aka Big Navi. 

Our colleagues over at PC Gamer have a detailed breakdown and some educated speculation around the technicalities of this hefty core count. But in layperson’s terms, it’s an indication of the power a next-gen AMD Radeon card could have. 

As it stands, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is the most powerful consumer graphics card on the market; in fact, it treads the line between being a consumer card and being a rectangle of enthusiast-grade graphics tech for 8K gaming and demanding creative workloads. 

The Radeon RX 6900 XT lags behind it, though it offers a huge amount of performance, specifically for 4K gaming, at a lower price — that’s if you can find the card in stock anywhere. 

But triple the cores of the Radeon RX 6900 XT could see a new graphics card from AMD — let’s call it the Radeon RX 7900 XT — hit back at Nvidia. 

There’s a caveat here, in that Nvidia's latest GeForce graphics cards don’t just offer a lot of raw power but also sport machine learning and AI tech that enables smart super sampling in the form of DLSS 2.0, which can deliver significant performance gains in games. The latest GeForce cards are also very capable at supporting ray tracing, something AMD cards can do as well, but not to the same level as their rivals from Team Green. 

Given AMD is still tipped to launch the Radeon RX 6600 XT some time soon, it’s unlikely we’ll see next-generation Navi or RDNA 3 graphics cards in the near future; they’d likely pop up in 2022 at the earliest. That means whatever AMD has planned will likely need to go head-to-head with next-gen graphics cards based on the rumored Nvidia Lovelace GPU architecture. Either way, the graphics card world doesn't look to be getting dull anytime soon; it’s just a pity that getting hold of these cards is so hard. 

Roland Moore-Colyer
Roland Moore-Colyer

Roland Moore-Colyer a Managing Editor at Tom’s Guide with a focus on news, features and opinion articles. He often writes about gaming, phones, laptops and other bits of hardware; he’s also got an interest in cars. When not at his desk Roland can be found wandering around London, often with a look of curiosity on his face.