AMD confirms imminent launch of 'new enthusiast-class Radeon 7000-series cards'
Looks like the RX 7800 and RX 7700 are very much on track for release in the next few months.
AMD is finally committing to rounding out its RDNA 3 GPU stack, with Dr. Lisa Su promising it is going to be launching new "enthusiast-class" graphics cards before the end of October. We've already had sources suggesting an August reveal for new cards, and a September launch is looking pretty good right now.
It's promising that Dr. Su is stating publicly that AMD is going to be releasing multiple cards, which implies that we will see both the RX 7800 and RX 7700 GPUs dropping in the next few months. After it dropped a solo Radeon RX 7600 at the end of May, there was maybe some concern that it would continue to drip-feed us RDNA 3 cards.
The announcement came in the recent AMD Q2 financials call, where some more green shoots of the PC industry revival have been noted. Those shoots are still pretty fragile, though, as AMD's gaming segment is still suffering from lower GPU sales, down both year-on-year and compared to the previous three months. Thankfully, it's semi-custom—console and handheld—chip business is still growing, mostly thanks to Sony and Microsoft, so that's offsetting AMD's tenuous grip on the graphics card market.
But it's hoping to change that in the next few months, however, with Dr. Su stating: "We are on track to further expand our RDNA 3 GPU offerings with the launch of new, enthusiast-class Radeon 7000 series cards in the third quarter."
And "enthusiast-class" sounds about right for an RX 7800 card that's looking like it will outperform Nvidia's excellent RTX 4070 and will probably come in significantly cheaper, too.
If you want to see a boatload of new GPUs then making them better and cheaper than the competition is a good way to go about it, right?
That performance expectation has come from leaked RX 7800 3DMark numbers, but Nvidia will always counter with the twin benefits of DLSS 3 and Frame Generation, though that is still only specifically available in a select few games right now.
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With an RX 7700 coming out below it, that ought to set up a tasty head-to-head between AMD's new cards and Nvidia's RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4070 GPUs. Who wins? We do. Maybe. Y'know, if prices start getting more competitive, anyways.
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Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.