AMD RDNA 5 To Be A Completely New GPU Architecture From The Ground Up, RDNA 4 Mostly Fixes RDNA 3 Issues & Improves Ray Tracing

AMD’s next-generation RDNA 5 GPUs are going to be built from the ground up and will aim to be the “Zen” moment for the Radeon division.

AMD Radeon Might Have To Wait Till RDNA 5 To Have Their “Zen” Moment As RDNA 4 GPUs Mostly A Tweak With Improved Ray Tracing

The new rumor comes from Chiphell Forum member, wjm47196, who is known for his cryptic messages on the site but has been correct when it comes to some of his past leaks such as the Radeon RX 6000 Refresh and the NVIDIA RTX 30 series cards. It’s been a while since those GPU series launched so now the forum member is back to posting about the next-generation series from AMD.

The leaker states that AMD’s plans with the RDNA 3 GPU lineup didn’t go as expected. The issues with RDNA 3 were caused by the final silicon not meeting internal performance projections and it was evident that the efficiency increase wasn’t necessarily as much as it was hyped up to be. The NVIDIA “Ada” GPUs on the other hand destroyed AMD RDNA 3 chips in efficiency figures across all segments. Furthermore, AMD had to tone down its initial designs which were going to incorporate up to 192 MB of Infinity Cache to just 96 MB due to cost and power constraints.

Looking ahead, AMD’s RDNA 4 GPUs are mostly going to be an architectural tweak of RDNA 3. The lineup is said to be comparable to the Radeon RX 7900 XT GPUs and as we know, there are going to be two SKUs, the Navi 48 and Navi 44, both of which will be targeted at mainstream and entry-level consumers similar to the first generation RDNA GPUs (Radeon RX 5000 series). One area where we might get to see some big improvements is going to be ray tracing performance which is in line with the rumors that we have heard so far especially since a similar IP block will be leveraged for the upcoming Sony PS5 Pro console.

AMD also has RDNA 3+ in the works which will mainly power the iGPU side of things on next-gen Ryzen APUs such as Strix Point and Strix Halo. Besides that, we are unaware if RDNA 3+ will be limited to iGPUs or if we will see any discrete rendition based on the architecture. Recent rumors have also said that AMD doesn’t plan on introducing any new Radeon RX 8000 GPUs this year but NVIDIA is expected to launch its flagship Blackwell RTX 5090 & RTX 5080 GPUs later this year.

So next up, we have the AMD RDNA 5 GPUs. The GPU generation following RDNA 4 is expected to be built on a brand new architecture designed from the ground up and it isn’t even known if AMD will retain the RDNA 5 branding for it or switch to something entirely new. The promise of the “Zen” moment has long been awaited in the Radeon family and RDNA 5 is expected to be just that.

AMD will be conducting a full case study and R&D when designing the next-gen architecture. RDNA 5 is also said to be the primary reason why RDNA 4 is being cut off so much so that more time can be put into perfecting the generation that comes after it all the while offering a mainstream series that doesn’t require lots of development costs. The GPU architecture is also rumored to be used in the next-gen Medusa APU lineup featuring Zen 6 cores.

Furthermore, the rumor puts a large emphasis on how AMD will be fine-tuning its AI and ROCm software suite by having Xilinx directly intervene in the matter. The “Radeon AI” branding is something that we can see in the future GPUs as the red team puts more focus on the “AI PC” segment, definitely when its main competitor calls “RTX” the premium AI PC platform.

The AMD RDNA 5 GPUs are still years away from launch and it will be around late 2025 or 2026 when we start getting a hint of what AMD has been cooking up. Will it be the Zen moment the Radeon team have been waiting for, well that’s something that we will find out in the coming years.

AMD RDNA Generational GPU Lineup