Nvidia GeForce RTX 6090 rival GPU from AMD wouldn't surprise former employee

A previous senior product manager for AMD has weighed in on rumors about the company readying a rival to the potential Nvidia GeForce RTX 6090, saying "it would not surprise me at all." AMD is rumored to be planning a return to the high-end gaming GPU market when it releases its RDNA 5 architecture in the future, with the AMD Radeon RX 10090 XT, if that's what it ends up being called, rumored to have a massive total of 154 compute units.

As a point of comparison, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, which is currently a favorite on our best graphics card buying guide, only has 64 compute units, meaning this new GPU could be massively more powerful. The new AMD graphics card is also rumored to have a massive 36GB of GDDR7 VRAM, giving it even more memory than the mighty Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090.

The latest comments come from James Prior, who was an AMD senior product manager until 2019. Speaking to Moore's Law is Dead (MLID) about the latest rumors, Prior stated that "it would not surprise me at all to see them [AMD] come in with a 6090 challenger," while also discussing the potential price and name of the new GPU.

Prior says that when it comes to price, if he were in charge, he "would go halfway between the 80 and the 90 of the next gen, just to say you've got a great high-end, top-end product that does all the workloads without breaking a sweat." If that's the strategy AMD decides to take, that would make the Radeon RX 10090 XT price around $1,499. However, it's going to be tough for AMD to charge a high price for a GPU when AMD FSR 4 is still only supported by a handful of games compared to Nvidia DLSS.

"It's really going to be down to the software, and whether they think they can catch up on the AI side of things," says Prior. However, he's optimistic that AMD can catch up here. "Given all the acquisitions in the last 12 months, and the big improvements you're hearing [about] from people working with their tools and their toolchain and software, about how much faster it's getting so quickly, then I think they're absolutely on track to come back and be very competitive."

Is the new GPU going to have a horrible name such as Radeon RX 10900 XT, though? Prior reveals some of the challenges about naming a new GPU, with several different voices in the discussion. "Number one is going to be the big OEMs, the MNCs, multinationals, the HP, Dell, Lenovos, and the Acers and Asus and all that kind of stuff. And they're going to simply say 'bigger number better,'" says Prior.

"And then the enthusiast community are like, you know, this [name] makes it really hard to talk about. We always have all of these different numbers and names and stuff. You got the old heads that are like 'X1900 XTX was an awesome card, bring that back. Do a throwback,' but, you know, there's this clean break between those cards and the new cards."

Nvidia got around the situation after the Pascal generation by introducing the new RTX brand to signify ray tracing and AI features, and it's possible AMD might do the same, perhaps using the AI brand it's used on its CPUs. However, Prior says, "I would be tempted to simply just increment the number, because if what you're doing to get your 2.5/2x uplift isn't a ground-up, clean-sheet new architecture with brand new features and brand new approach that lets you go to a new brand, then just increment, right?"

As this is all speculation right now, though, we'll have to wait and see what AMD brings us with its next-generation GPUs, which are still years away from release right now.

In the meantime, check out our AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT review to see how the company's new budget graphics card performs, as well as our guide to the best gaming CPU, where we take you through all our favorite processors right now, including both AMD and Intel models.

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