Great news for gamers: AMD may be launching two new budget gaming GPUs

The rumor mill has been churning as always and this time, the word on the street is that AMD's Radeon RDNA 3 lineup may be getting two new budget entry-level graphics cards — the RX 7400 and RX 7300. If true, it would be under the AMD Radeon RX 7600’s $259 price point, considered one of the best graphics cards on the market.

There are two sources for this leaked information (reported on by PCGamesN, with the first being a tweet from KOMACHI_ENSAKA stating “Radeon RX 7400 & RX 7300” and a winky emoji, while the second is a follow-up tweet that says “0x7499, NV33.” In the second post, the NV33 part refers to the Navi 33 GPU that powers the RX 7600, and the 0x7499 part is a device ID that refers to a model of graphics card – in this case, it refers to three different model types.

This isn’t the first time we have heard rumors that AMD is developing more budget-minded cards. Back in 2023, there were whispers of one of the RDNA 4 being a mid-range card at a more affordable price, which turned out to be the RX 7600. 

So, these rumors could end up being quite reputable, which would be great news for gamers who need much cheaper options.

Possible specs for the RX 7400 and 7300

Though there’s no other information at this time concerning the two possible budget cards, we can surmise what specs they could have. Looking at the RX 7600, it has 2,048 RDNA 3 stream processors split up into 32 compute units (CUs), and 8GB of GDDR6 memory via a 128-bit memory bus, running up to 2,655MHz.

The last generation’s RX 6500 XT, meanwhile, had a GPU with 1,024 RDNA 2 stream processors (16 CUs), while the RX 6400 had 768 RDNA 2 stream processors (12 CUs). Therefore, the RX 7400 having at least 16 CUs but preferably up to 20 CUs would be an ideal range, with the RX 7300 having at least 12 CUs but preferably up to 16 CUs. These specs wouldn’t overlap with the RX 7600 while still offering a noticeable upgrade to the previous generation’s cards.

Why are budget cards so important?

There’s clearly a market for these kinds of cards for gamers as well, and you only need to turn to the Steam Hardware & Software Survey. According to the latest survey, the eighth most popular graphics card is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060, which came out in 2016 and has no AI hardware or ray tracing.

This is solely because it balances an incredible price point with enough power to handle most of the best PC games. Later cards may have come with more bells and whistles but lacked a significant enough performance upgrade to entice users to make the switch. But if the RX 7300 and 7400 truly exist with far more power than the 1060 and cost under $200, you have an absolute winning combination that would appeal to nearly every gamer.

You might also like

• AMD Radeon RX 7600: a major gift for gamers on a budget
• AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT review: decent enough, but not as good
• AMD's successor to the RX 7600 could be an affordable GPU