It is currently easier to get blood out of a stone than to find current generation graphics card inventory, but that hasn't stopped leaks that hint at the performance of the next generation of AMD graphics.

We know that AMD is working on the RDNA 3 GPU architecture based on RDNA 2, which is found in the AMD Big Navi, aka Radeon RX 6900 XT and Radeon RX 6800 XT. However, new leaks suggest that future mid-range Radeon graphics cards will have the same performance as AMD's current top-end GPUs.

The leak comes courtesy of regular tipster Yuko Yoshida, who says the GPU, dubbed Navi 33, will be comparable to the Navi 21 GPU in the Radeon RX 6900 XT, but will use a next-generation graphics core. WCCFtech noted that while this all sounds somewhat outlandish, AMD is promising a significant performance boost from RDNA 2 to RDNA 3

and that if this leak proves legitimate, the Navi 33 card, like the Navi 21 GPU in the RX 6900 XT, will have 80 compute units, like the Navi 21 GPU in the RX 6900 XT. Such a card would beat out other heavy-hitting GPUs in the Radeon RX 6000 series.

The Navi 33 is the equivalent of the Navi 23 and is expected to be the foundation for the Radeon RX 6600 and RX 6600 XT when they are introduced in the near future. [The Navi 33 GPU will use the next-generation RDNA 3 architecture, which is expected to move from a 7-nanometer process node to a 5-nanometer, which will likely increase speed and efficiency over the powerful previous generation GPUs by putting more transistors per silicon slice. Highly likely.

The Radeon RX 6900 XT is a serious 4K gaming graphics card, but it comes with a hefty price tag of $999. This is less than the $1,499 Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, but hardly cheap. But if AMD can bring this level of performance to a mid-range graphics card under $500, it could be a winner and seriously challenge the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080.

Of course, this is all speculation based on leaks, which we cannot verify. However, it does paint a positive picture of future AMD graphics cards, which should be revealed sometime in 2022, if semiconductor manufacturing can actually produce enough next-generation graphics cards for avid PC gamers.