Is AMD giving up battling NVIDIA at the top-end? Rumor claims RDNA 4 won't have high-end GPUs

AMD's range of RDNA 4 graphics cards may not have any high-end boards, we've heard from the ever-spinning rumor mill.

We doubtless don't need to tell you that this is a rumor to be particularly skeptical about, as not only are these next-gen GPUs still a long way off - they're set to arrive next year - but it's a real eye-opener. In short, it would be a big move for AMD to dispense with making a Navi 31 equivalent for the next generation (and as the leaker Kepler points out, it harks back to RDNA 1 days).

VideoCardz immediately chipped in to tweet a question about how credible this information is, to which Kepler replied that they've heard it from three separate sources.

To look at this another way, AMD would kind of be 'doing an Intel' - topping out at mid-range discrete GPUs, and leaving the high-end as NVIDIA's territory to occupy uncontested. (Intel, for that matter, may even eschew the mid-range with its next-gen GPUs, if one theory from the rumor mill pans out - Team Blue may only produce lower-end graphics cards with Battlemage).

The more cynical on Twitter, of course, have a take fueled very much by the relentless pricing fatigue that has worn down many gamers over the past generation or two - that there may not be any high-end RDNA 4 GPUs from AMD, but there'll still be high-end pricing. Ahem.

At any rate, a more serious theory is that if AMD takes this route, and doesn't make a large die RDNA 4 offering, there could be the possibility of two smaller dies fused together for a beefier graphics card, as Wccftech (which spotted the above tweet) points out.

Of course, with all the chatter about supplying heavyweight GPUs for AI usage of late - and AMD clearly indicating its intention to pipe products to the Chinese market for AI (taking into account US export restrictions) - it's not too surprising to hear that Team Red might be pulling back its ambitions for RDNA 4.

After all, trying to compete with high-end NVIDIA hasn't worked out too well with RDNA 3. And there's a lot more money, and higher profit levels, to be mined in those AI hills. NVIDIA itself is looking to cash in on the artificial intelligence boom, too, which very much has no signs of remotely abating in the nearer-term future.

Whatever the case, we're about to find out what mid-range RDNA 3 will be like - and a lot of eyes will be watching. It looks like we're getting an RX 7800 XT, from a recent piece of spillage courtesy of PowerColor, and there'll likely be another GPU with that (the RX 7700, or maybe 7700 XT). How they stack up to NVIDIA, and how AMD prices them, is going to be extremely interesting to see.

The successors to those graphics cards may, after all, be the most powerful products RDNA 4 has to offer.