An AMD Navi 32 die has been spotted in a Forbes video featuring the company's CEO and President Lisa Su. This has sparked speculation in the PC hardware community about why Team Red has not yet released proper mid-range RDNA 3 game-oriented models. Some news sites have reported that a Navi 32 GPU is at the heart of AMD's new workstation-grade AMD Radeon Pro W7800 32 GB GDDR6 graphics card, but fact checkers have pointed out that the $2499 (MSRP) product is actually based on Navi 31. Sites have theorized about the possible makeup of a "Radeon RX 7800" GPU and assumed that a similarly named/numbered workstation model would offer a preview of things to come.
Igor Wallossek, of Igor's Lab, has conducted an investigation into this matter. He has tested a Radeon Pro W7800 unit as a gaming card, but the high-end nature of the Navi 31 GPU leads him to believe that the performance level on tap would be roughly equivalent to a hypothetical "RX 7800 XT." Igor assumes that his simulated gaming card will have access to a smaller pool of VRAM (16 GB instead of 32 GB) and sets provisions for differing power consumption due to the workstation card being an efficiency-focused product. Overall, Igor's benchmark tests of his simulated gaming card show small performance advantages over the previous gen Radeon RX 6800 XT model.
Igor also compares the Radeon Pro W7800 to mid-range Team Green offerings and concludes that AMD could be onto a winner, but a new upper mid-range model will likely face internal competition from heavily discounted predecessors. He believes that the Radeon RX 7800 XT with a power limit of around 270 to 275 watts and a higher clock could become a real blockbuster for AMD, if the price is right. This is because it fills a gap that NVIDIA has left open and that cannot be filled with the current generation.
