A new high-end AMD graphics card is reportedly being tested in the company's labs right now, with significantly more powerful specs than the company's current crop of GPUs, including large quantities of GDDR7 VRAM and very high clock speeds. The latest speculation says that the new GPU could potentially beat the RTX 5080 Super and RTX 4090, and is likely to be called the AMD Radeon RX 9090 XT or 9080 XT.
As we've just found in our abandon high-end GPUs with this generation, which makes these latest rumors particularly surprising.
YouTube tech leaker Moore's Law is Dead (MLID) spilled the beans about the new GPU in his latest video, which you can see below. However, bear in mind that AMD hasn't officially announced anything about a new high-end GPU, so this story needs to be parked in the Rumor Land multi-storey tower for the moment.
If there's some truth in the rumors, however, that would be good news for gamers, as there's currently no competition to go up against the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Super and potentially the RTX 4090. No solid details on the core GPU have been leaked so far, but MLID states that the new GPU is being tested on graphics cards with both 16GB and 32GB configurations.
Not only that, but the memory is reportedly high-speed GDDR7 VRAM, rather than the slower GDDR6 memory used on AMD's current RDNA 4 graphics cards. According to MLID, the memory communicates with the GPU via a 256-bit bus, which means we could be looking at 1TB/s of bandwidth. MLID also states that the clock speeds are huge, with the GPU apparently running game clocks of 3.4-3.7GHz, significantly quicker than the 2.4GHz game clock of the 9070 XT and 2,530MHz of the 9060 XT. Meanwhile, the total graphics power is apparently peaking over 450W at full load.
In of performance, the new GPU is apparently, on average, 28% faster than the Radeon RX 9070 XT at 4K, with peak performance boosts of up to 45%. While no specific data about the GPU itself has been leaked, MLID speculates that it's likely to square up to the RTX 5080 Super, and possibly even give the RTX 4090 a run for its money.
The core spec of the GPU is unlikely to change, though. "It is very likely that this is a new revision of the Navi 48 die," says Tom from Moore's Law is Dead, "not just some overclocked binning." Navi 48 is the same chip used in the Radeon RX 9070 XT, and it contains 64 compute units – there's no way to add more compute units to it, so we'd be talking about a tweaked revision to this GPU, perhaps made with a smaller manufacturing process, rather than a whole new design with loads more stream processors. However, smaller transistors can result in a more power-efficient GPU with the potential for faster clock speeds.
With this sort of performance uplift, and the superior memory system, AMD could have a killer GPU on its hands, as long as it gets the pricing right. Of course, this is all just rumor at the moment, but it would be great if AMD had an answer to at least the RTX 5080, even if it can't compete with the mighty RTX 5090.
In the meantime, check out our guide to the Radeon RX 9070 XT review to see how AMD's current fastest GPU performs.
You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides. In addition, we have a vibrant community Discord server, where you can chat about this story with of the team and fellow readers.