Just last week rumors emerged of there possibly being two new budget AMD Radeon GPUs, the RX 7400 and RX 7300. However, fresh rumors are now suggesting that whatever those cards might have been, they’re not actively being worked on as new budget graphics cards for the gaming market.
It’s a sad development, as the best graphics card lists of the world are crying out for some truly budget options to recommend to buyers. AMD‘s current Radeon RX 7600 props up our list as the top option for buyers on a budget, but it’s still a $250 card. An RX 7400 or RX 7300 that offered basic 1080p performance for closer to $150 would’ve been a very welcome addition.
The new leak comes from Taiwanese tech site, Benchlife, which reports having looked into the plans of several add-in board (AIB) partners – the company’s that make the actual graphics cards – for AMD and found that none are actively working on new budget cards based on AMD’s current RDNA 3 GPU architecture. It does, however, go on to say that it’s possible that the likes of Dell, HP, and Lenovo (DHL, as it calls them) could be working on such cards for exclusive use in small, business, or embedded types of systems.
The latter scenario would make a lot of sense as although a budget graphics card based on the same Navi 33 GPU as the RX 7600 would be a welcome product for consumers on a budget, it’s possible it would be a product with vanishingly small profit margins for AMD and its partners. After all, there’s a certain amount of fixed cost to making a graphics card – you always need a PCB, memory chips, other components, a cooler – quite outside of the varying cost of the GPU that sits at the heart of it. As such, there’s only so cheap a card can ever be.
So, while it’s looking like there’s a good chance we might not ever see the RX 7400 and RX 7300 as standalone graphics cards, there was some positive news from this Benchlife report. They claim that all the AIBs they’ve heard from are “currently busy with the next generation of Radeon graphics cards based on the RDNA 4 GPU architecture.” While there wasn’t any meaningful doubt as to a new generation of AMD graphics cards being in development for release relatively soon, this confirms that the development is well underway.
Whether we actually see any RDNA 4 graphics cards this year, or if the latest rumors that the RX 8000 series release date won’t be until early next year prove to be true, is not something this latest report provides much of a hint on but it does at least show there’s no reason to suspect any further delay.
As for what Nvidia’s cooking up to compete with AMD’s RDNA 4 cards, you can check out what we currently know about the Blackwell architecture specs and check out what a possible new RTX Titan AI card could look like.
