Lisa Su, chief executive of AMD, this week confirmed that the company is on track to release its mainstream graphics cards based on its RDNA 3 architecture this quarter. Lisa did not specify which products AMD plans to launch, but it is reasonable to expect cheaper Radeon RX 7000-series products to hit the market in the next few months.
"We are on track to expand our RDNA 3 GPU portfolio with the launch of new mainstream Radeon RX 7000-series GPUs this quarter," Su said at the earnings conference call with analysts and investors.
AMD's high-end RDNA 3-based Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT, which belong to the best graphics cards available today, have been on the market for over four months now. At $999 and $899, these boards look to be pretty competitive against competing offerings from Nvidia in numerous games, but they are quite expensive for average gamers. The 7900 XT price has also dropped to $799 of late, in part due to competition with Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti. Regardless, while AMD may earn a lot per board sold, their volumes are not high.
Based on data from Jon Peddie Research, AMD's share of the discrete graphics card market for desktops reached 11% in Q4 2022, an indicator that the company's high-volume GPUs were not particularly popular among graphics cards manufacturers and PC OEMs. By contrast, Nvidia dominated the market with an 84% share.
To perhaps grab some market share back, it's nearing time for AMD to release its Radeon RX 7600-, Radeon RX 7700-, and Radeon RX 7800-series graphics cards. These will invariably cost less than the premium Radeon RX 7900-series, and will hopefully offer higher performance than the company's RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6000-series cards that are now over two years old.
The question is whether the upcoming mainstream RX 7000-series parts will offer a better value than the existing RX 6000-series GPUs. The RX 6950 XT for example can now be picked up for just $599, and in non-ray tracing games it delivers performance roughly on par with the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 3090, and not far below the RX 7900 XT. What will a mainstream RX 7600 XT offer, in terms of price and performance? That remains to be seen.
Interestingly, a newly discovered AMD ROCm 5.6 pull request contains a number of AMD's yet-unreleased graphics cards based on the company's Navi 31, Navi 32, and Navi 33 GPUs. These are designed for premium, high-end, performance mainstream, mainstream, and entry-level segments. If the model numbers are not placeholders for later use, we could see the Radeon RX 7800 XT, 7700 XT, 7600 XT, and 7500 XT for desktop computers as well as the Radeon RX 7600M XT, 7600M, 7700S, and 7600S for laptops in the coming months.
While Su confirmed plans to expand the company's RDNA 3-based portfolio shortly, she did not reveal when exactly the chip designer plans to start sales of the new Radeon RX 7000-series products. The company also did not provide any guidance regarding sales of its discrete GPU offerings in Q2, so it's unclear whether it expects to sell a lot of its mainstream RDNA 3-based offerings during the quarter.
