For the time being, everything indicates that Nvidia will not have much competition in the next generation of graphics cards, at least as far as the high-end is concerned. Even today, AMD is not enough there, and its fastest Radeon RX 7900 XTX is rather in the lower high-end. It doesn’t have Nvidia’s most powerful models AMD unfortunately the answer and Intel is not at all. It will be even worse in the new generation, because here AMD allegedly does not want to create successors to already existing flagships. So far we know that a low-end chip should appear Navi 44 and will head into the higher mainstream Navi 48 (unconventionally, the higher class gets a higher designation and not a lower one). In terms of performance, Navi 44 should end up somewhere at the level of the current RX 7700 XT, or GeForce RTX 4060 Ti. The Navi 48 is supposed to reach the level of the GeForce RTX 4080, which is a decent high-end card today, but when the Blackwell from Nvidia appears, such performance will already fall into the mainstream (theoretically to a GeForce RTX 5070?).
A tweet from Kepler (@Kepler_L2) has now appeared on the social network X (Twitter), which has hinted that all graphics cards with the RDNA 4 architecture will continue to receive GDDR6 memory. So they should not even have the faster GDDR6X, which are widely available today, nor the upcoming GDDR6W, and certainly not GDDR7. As for the speed, it should be stuck at 18 Gbps for all models. While the current Rydeon RX 7900 XTX with a generous 384-bit bus and 20Gbps memories reaches a memory throughput of 960 GB/s, the new generation could reach a maximum of 576 GB/s if the assumptions about the 256-bit bus and 18Gbps chips are fulfilled.
But this could also bring positive consequences. GDDR6 memory is produced in really large series, it is a mature technology with a low price, while new and more powerful types of GDDR memory can be more of a risk due to a higher sensitivity to their eventual shortage, which can drive prices up. Despite the higher efficiency of new types, the overall consumption of older models may be slightly lower.
