AMD could be cooking up a new gaming GPU that's "40% faster" than the 9070 XT

More chatter has emerged about a new high-end AMD gaming GPU possibly waiting in the wings, with the latest rumors saying that the AMD Radeon RX 9090 XT is "40% faster" than AMD's current top-end graphics card, the Radeon RX 9070 XT. The new GPU is likened to the AMD Radeon VII, a high-end graphics card that AMD launched in 2019 to squeeze high-end performance out of its Vega architecture, with 16GB of high-speed HBM2 memory.

Although the latest AMD GPUs aren't seeing any love in the May Steam Survey, we've been really impressed by their performance for the money. We even gave the top-end chip a score of 9/10 in our AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT review, earning it a place on our best GPU guide, although real-world pricing makes it a harder sell now.

However, the core spec of the new AMD GPU is rumored to be staying the same as that of the 9070 XT. Instead of designing a whole new chip, AMD is reportedly planning to produce its existing Navi 48 GPU on a smaller manufacturing process, enabling it to crank up the clock speeds and reduce the power draw.

As with previous AMD Radeon RX 9090 XT rumors, this latest commentary comes from tech YouTuber Moore's Law is Dead (MLID), which you can see for yourself in the video below, so take it with the appropriate grain of salt for the moment.

The new card, says MLID, is "a bit like Radeon VII. There might be a die shrink of Navi 48 coming with GDDR7 support that was probably just designed for the AI market…I heard ridiculously high clock speeds, 40% more bandwidth, but fundamentally nothing that new. They're just taking the same thing, it's 40% faster, because it uses a better node and better RAM, and that's very easy to do compared to designing an entirely new architecture."

Again, MLID reiterated that the new card could come with up to 32GB of GDDR7 VRAM, and speculates that it could cost $1,000 with performance that "matches the 4090." Even with very high clock speeds, 32GB of memory, and a die shrink, though, I think this rumored GPU would struggle to match the RTX 4090, given the latter's huge number of CUDA cores - it has a huge amount of rendering power on tap.

MLID also speculates that while the Radeon RX 9090 XT is unlikely to be able to challenge the RTX 5090, the new GPU could possibly even beat the RTX 5090 at 1080p, "because clock speed matters more there."

Of course, this is all just rumor at the moment, and the 9070 XT may indeed mark the point where RDNA 4 peaks - we'll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, check out my Radeon RX 9060 XT review to see how AMD's latest budget gaming GPU performs, as well as my tutorial on how to install a graphics card, which guides you through the whole upgrade process.

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