The release of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 means you may have forgotten all about AMD — but don’t expect that buzz to last forever, as a new desktop-based AMD graphics card, the AMD Radeon Pro W7900 GPU, has been spotted on the PugetBench benchmark database.
However, unlike the new Nvidia cards, it seems unlikely that this new AMD card will be a piece of gaming focused hardware. Instead, it seems to be related to AMD’s other flagship workstation cards, like the AMD Radeon Pro W6900X, so will likely to be focused more on providing grunt for technical or scientific work. As such, expect it to have support for a large number of additional displays, as well as a large amount of RAM — perhaps as much as 48GB.
At the moment, specifications are largely based on speculation, but it’s entirely possible we will be seeing the RDNA3 GPU with Navi 31 GPU, which would mean we’re looking at a card with 6144 cores, 48 WGPs, and 96 CUs. As mentioned, the last generation of a similar AMD card, the W6900X, was exclusive to Apple system, but it looks like this won’t be the case this time around, as the benchmark specifically mentions an Intel Core i7-12700K on a Z690 AORUS Master motherboard, neither of which are generally associated with modern Apple machines, so it seems unlikely this card will be aimed specifically at Apple’s machines.
The scores are somewhat underwhelming, sitting at a GPU score of 135.3. That’s 15% slower than the gaming-focused Radeon RX 7900 XTX, and slower than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 as well — but crushing benchmark isn’t likely going to be what this card excels at anyway, as it’s highly likely it’s aimed at workstation PCs, and will support features not seen in either of those two previous cards.
It’s been a quiet 2023 for AMD thus far, with the giant seemingly happy to let Nvidia take the lead for the new year. However, this leak suggests that AMD certainly has new hardware cooking off-screen, so we can expect to see more of these sorts of leaks and rumors popping up in the coming months.