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AMD might crush Nvidia with its laptop GPUs — but it’s silent on the desktop front

AMD’s graphics card lineup for laptops is on the way, and by the sound of it, it’s shaping up to be pretty exciting — and it’s already bigger than Team Red’s current desktop range.

According to a recent leak, AMD may even be able to rival Nvidia’s best desktop GPUs with its Navi 32 cards. But where are the desktop equivalents?

https://twitter.com/All_The_Watts/status/1665360849584934912

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There’s nothing like a set of juicy GPU rumors to shake things up a little, and the scoop today is particularly interesting. Twitter leaker @All_The_Watts shared some gossip about AMD’s upcoming RDNA 3 lineup for laptops. It looks like AMD may be readying up to five GPUs based on the Navi32 chip. Non-laptop users might feel a little overlooked right now because the midrange Navi 32 is still yet to make an appearance in desktops.

As you can see in the tweet embedded above, the GPUs that are reportedly on the way include models that are painfully absent from the desktop range. We’ve got the RX 7800M XT, with 60 compute units (CUs) and 16GB RAM, as well as the RX 7800M, RX 7700M, and two S models: RX 7900S and the RX 7800S. All five look to be fairly power-efficient, with a maximum total board power (TBP) ranging from 165 watts to 120 watts. Moreover, they’ve got plenty of VRAM, which is something that cannot be said of Nvidia’s recent RTX 4060 Ti.

Speaking of Nvidia, All_The_Watts also included a screenshot from 3DMark Time Spy that shows the predicted performance of the RX 7800M XT, and it looks like it might be highly competitive against Nvidia’s GPUs. The RX 7800M XT scored 17,842 points in the test, and as we saw in our RTX 4070 review, that’s that desktop card hovers around 17,000. That’s a lot of potential for a gaming laptop.

https://twitter.com/All_The_Watts/status/1665749416303788032

Of course, this is just a synthetic benchmark, so actual performance can’t be determined until the card is out in the wild and available in laptops. However, this does bode well for the range, although the desktop equivalents are still a big question mark.

AMD’s RDNA 3 desktop lineup is still fairly modest. We had the RX 7900 XTX and the RX 7900 XT last year, and now, the recent RX 7600. That leaves a huge gap between the high-end and budget segment. The RX 7800 (XT) and the RX 7700 (XT) would do nicely here, but so far, AMD is staying silent while Nvidia fills out its Ada Lovelace lineup with more GPUs.

Regardless of if and when the five laptop GPUs make it to the market, the increased laptop presence for AMD will make a nice alternative for those who prefer Team Red over Team Green, and it looks like these GPUs might be able to handle some serious gaming.

Monica J. White
Monica is a UK-based freelance writer and self-proclaimed geek. A firm believer in the "PC building is just like expensive…
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