The gaming world has been glancing at its watch and metaphorically hitting F5 on the AMD Radeon landing page since December. That's when the company launched its flagship RDNA3 GPUs with the 7900 series. Since then, there's been nothing but crickets from the company. It's unclear why we've seen zero activity in response to multiple recent GPU introductions from Nvidia, as both companies typically pour cold water on each others' launches. Regardless, AMD is about to rise from its slumber and will launch "new mainstream Radeon 7000 series GPUs" this quarter.
The announcement of new Radeon GPUs waiting in the wings was made by none other than AMD CEO Lisa Su during the company's quarterly earnings call. Sadly, zero additional details were offered. However, note the use of the word "mainstream." That can only mean the Radeon 7600 XT, as pointed out by PC Gamer. We've been expecting the release of the 7800 and 7700 XT cards, but nobody would use that word for these GPUs as they would probably land in the $500 to $650 range. That leaves only the 7600 XT, rumored to launch at the end of May. It might even be a paper launch, with GPUs arriving in June. There's still no word on the 7800 and 7700 variants.
The Radeon 7600 XT's arrival will relieve a yawning chasm in AMD's lineup, as it will be a decidedly "mainstream" card designed for 1080p gameplay. It uses the midsize Navi 33 die, a monolithic design instead of a chiplet-based GPU like its big brothers. Another big difference compared with its more expensive family members is that instead of being built on TSMC's 5nm process, it uses the less expensive 6nm node, similar to the 7nm node used for RDNA 2. It's a dual-use chip that will also power gaming laptops such as the Radeon 7600M XT.
Its specs include 32 compute units with 2,048 stream processors and 8GB of GDDR6 memory running on a narrow 128-bit memory bus. The mobile version tops out at 2.3GHz, but we can expect higher clocks on the desktop version. For context, the Radeon 6600 XT reached 2.6GHz. Still, the 7600 XT is a 1080p card, so the big question is pricing. PC Gamer notes the 6600 XT launched in the middle of the pandemic at $379, which seems a bit outrageous these days. However, with how GPU pricing has been going, it wouldn't be surprising to see AMD double down on that price again. After all, it's not like it has to worry about Nvidia undercutting it.