That's just an excuse for not making enthusiast cards. Enthusiast cards sell also midrange and low end cards.
Hello? NOT an appropriate position. AMD is making a massive pivot with RDNA+CDNA unification, returning to the kind of product stack that was the best standard. They have let us know this is the last stop before the big change. So who is expected to buy the new range of cards? We don't even have a handle on that. Could be guys like me on RX480/580 that buy once every 5-10 years, try to escape as it gets long in the tooth then run into problems on any new shift. Maybe it's for people from the nVidia camp that have been in it too long and want to test the AMD waters. We all have the idea the next flagship is going to be
a really small die and then the next round of enthusiast cards are set to ship much later under UDNA, which will most likely have MUCH larger dies that are likely comparable to the 6950XT the way AMD has been doing packaging the last few generations. Supposedly the kind of cut we see between Pascal and Volta (Tesla).
Imagine calling for enthusiast cards on a new process with last gen's memory and speeds while some very serious changes are in the works for hardware and software on a distant scheduled release that is likely going to be double or triple the die size (mm²) with the promise of significantly less headache. What I'm saying is the 8000/9000 rollout is likely going to be the redheaded stepchild of the bunch and then BAM we get something completely insane like
Tesla V100 die sizes. The small chip will be really cool but if it's the designated capstone of this era, that party is going to be really short lived.
RDNA 4 is probably a fixed RDNA 3 plus the RT improvements SONY demanded from them to remain a customer. AMD's only new problem is Intel, but I think they will try to ignore Intel for now.
This is not even a guess. RDNA3 is a complete product stack and RDNA4 is some supposed "bugfix" even though there's no new information on features. Everybody that has bought 7000 series has already settled in with whatever features/issues and they're good for the next couple of years if not the rest of the decade. Those guys are all set. Weird miner products like the BC-250 have already exposed the reality of PS5 hardware and we're still in this really stupid MX standoff with GPUs as none of the three companies are producing anything that competes with one another. We don't have enough information on how this goes and it gets shakier with each dumb leak thread. Guess we'll have to wait until next week to be sure.
"AMD hasn't officially dropped the price of the RX 6950 XT to $599, at least as far as we're aware — the
AMD store lists the reference card at $699 (and it's out of stock). But
Newegg,
Amazon, and others have regularly had RX 6950 XT cards priced in the $599–$699 range for several months
$500-550ish *with water block
The people that waited on 6800XT-6950XT price drops have been snackin GOOD these past several months. The guys picking up 6000 series mid-range are all happy.
I would consider it too but there's this nagging voice telling me it's cheaper to go with newer product and for creator features I don't need, like AV1 encode and a buffer over 16GB.
I'll never need these on desktop since 1080p144 is my max but the moment I hop into VR or some 3D kit it's an immediate jump like dual 4K. There's no ignoring it anymore.
But...A lot can happen in a year. We could see weird price hikes and drops here and there, maybe a whole new semiconductor or new manufacturing technology. We gonn' find out.