Radeon RX 8700 XT will be the graphics card middle band which will use the AMD RDNA 4 architecture and will succeed the current Radeon RX 7700 slower than the other.

As with AMD’s entire Radeon RX 8000 lineup, the information we have is scarce, but I know you’re interested in this model, so I’ve compiled and grouped them all together. reliable rumors and leaks which has happened to date. With all this information carefully researched, I’ll tell you everything we know about the Radeon RX 8700 XT so far.

This graphics card will be below the Radeon RX 8800 XT and will directly compete with NVIDIA’s new mid-range generation. Nothing is confirmed yet, but logically it is the most likely which sits between the GeForce RTX 5060 and the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, although he may also surprise with a good performance in the end and be closer to the second than the first.

Possible specifications of Radeon RX 8700 XT

• Navi 48 graphics core made on TSMC’s 4nm node.
• Four L3 cache chiplets, each 16MB in size, built on TSMC’s 6nm node.
• 64 computing units.
• 4096 shaders at 3 GHz.
• 256 texturing units.
• 192 raster units.
• 96 cores of the third generation RT.
• 128 second generation cores for AI.
• 256-bit bus.
• 16 GB of GDDR7 memory at 28 Gbps (896 GB/s bandwidth). It is rumored that it could use GDDR6 memory to reduce costs, but this is not confirmed.
• 4MB L2 cache.
• 64 MB L3 cache externalized on four chips.

If we compare it with the Radeon RX 7700 XT, we have a clear increase in the number of shaders, it goes from 3,456 to 4,096. As a result, the numbers of texturing units have also increased, as well as ray tracing and AI cores. The memory bus is also improved by going from 192 bits to 256 bits, and the L2 and L3 caches are also increased.

All of these changes, along with the architectural improvements that will come with RDNA 4 and the increase in operating frequency, should translate into a significant increase in performance compared to the Radeon RX 7700 XT. While it’s hard to make an exact guess, I think it’s likely the Radeon RX 8700 between Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7900 GRE.

The Navi 48 GPU that the Radeon RX 8700 XT would use will be a highly cropped version complete model. It will be produced in TSMC 4nm node and it will retain the MCM design, which means the GPU will be monolithic, but will be connected to four L3 cache chiplets, each with a capacity of 16MB. These will be produced on TSMC’s 6nm node.

If we talk about consumption, this graphics card should be more efficient than the Radeon RX 7700 XT, which has a TBP of 245 watts. With that in mind, and taking into account the increase in shaders and the increase in clock frequencies, I think it is most likely that the Radeon RX 8700 XT will consume between 200 and 225 watts, approximately. This would of course be true for the reference model and may change for models that come with home overclocks.

A look at the architecture and possible performance

Radeon RX 8700 repeat the MCM design which we saw in the Radeon RX 7000. If confirmed:

• The GPU will have an MCM (multi-chip module) design, with the GPU and four cache chiplets in different packages sharing the package.
• Each chiplet will have 16 MB of L3 cache.
• It will preserve the structure of shaders, ray tracing acceleration cores, and AI acceleration cores.

Again, we will have a structure based on computing units. Each compute unit will have 64 shaders capable of working one Wave64 or two Wave32 instructionswhich are known as dual-emission shaders, in addition to 4 texture units, one raytracing acceleration core and two AI acceleration cores.

The GPU will be manufactured on TSMC’s 4nm node and the cache chips could be manufactured on the 6nm node. AMD is rumored to be using node 3nm on GPU and 5nm on cache, but they have less credibility, especially if it is confirmed that this generation will serve as a minor refresh and transition to the Radeon RX 9000.

The most important changes that the RDNA 4 architecture could introduce include increased operating frequencies, higher performance at the shader level, ray tracing cores, and more powerful and efficient next-generation artificial intelligence, and AMD can use this generational change to introduce new technologies.

There is a lot of talk about it FSR 4, but the truth is that we still don’t have anything official. I have seen rumors saying that this new version could finally use AI applied to games to improve performance and that it would be accelerated at the hardware level through the AI ​​cores present in the Radeon RX 7000, although it is not ruled out. which have software support on the Radeon RX 6000.

Now we have to talk about power. If the specs I gave you in this article are confirmed, it will have a Radeon RX 8700 XT peak performance in FP32 49.15 TFLOPs, thanks to its dual-emission shaders. The Radeon RX 7700 XT has the power 35.17 TFLOPs on FP32 and Radeon RX 7900 GRE achieves 45.98 TFLOPs.

These numbers allow us to make a quick comparison of what we can expect in terms of performance from the Radeon RX 8700 XT. With this configuration, it would have everything to outperform the Radeon RX 7900 GRE, although it is important to remind you that the raw performance in FP32 It doesn’t equate linearly to gaming performance.

The most important performance improvement could be in ray tracing and not rasterization. In terms of efficiency, fairly modest improvements are expected, and the possibility of AMD using a bus configuration is not completely ruled out. 192 bits and 12 GB of graphics memory on Radeon RX 8700 XT. In this case, its gaming performance would be much lower and it would be lower than the Radeon RX 7900 GRE in 4K.

What PSU and CPU will I need to power the Radeon RX 8700 XT

As always, it will depend on the configuration we have. If the specs and consumption we’ve seen are confirmed, the Radeon RX 8700 XT will have a maximum TBP of 225 watts. With that level of consumption from a 600W power supply We won’t have any problems if we use a processor that doesn’t consume too much, such as the Ryzen 5 7600.

However, if we have a processor with a higher consumption, it would be ideal to fit the power supply o between 650 and 700 wattsdepending on its peak consumption. I will give you another example, the Intel Core i9-13900K can exceed 300 watts of peak consumption, which added to the graphics, and the rest of the PC components would take us almost 600 watts.

As for the processor required to power this Radeon RX 8700 XT, the minimum level would be Ryzen 5 5600 or Intel Core i5-11600Kalthough it would be ideal to have a Ryzen 5 7600 or an Intel Core i5-12600K, especially if we plan to use rescaling, as this lowers the base rendering resolution and the processor has a greater impact on game performance.

A Radeon RX 8700 XT would be with these specs a model specialized for 1440p which would also offer very good performance at 2160p (4K). If we use it to move games in 1080p, it is very likely that we will end up with a significant bottleneck, because at this resolution the graphics card will be very economical if we do not activate ray tracing.

Price and release date

Introducing the Radeon RX 8700 first half of 2025. We don’t have a specific date yet, but it may arrive at the same time as the Radeon RX 8800 XT. There are also rumors saying that both could arrive at the end of 2024, but that information has been slowly losing steam.

Its price will range between 400 and 449 euros, numbers that would allow it to clearly differentiate itself from the Radeon RX 8800 XT, which should cost between 500 and 549 euros. These prices would only apply to the reference model, which will be the cheapest of all. Models with superior design and finish will command higher prices, as always.

AI generated images.