AMD is seemingly working on a gaming card packing double the amount of memory available on the Radeon 9070 series. This should make it a tempting option for AI developers and gamers aiming to play at higher resolutions with larger, more-detailed textures.
According to leaker zhangzhonghao on the Chiphell forums, AMD is planning a 32GB Radeon RX 9000 graphics card, matching the capacity of GeForce RTX 5090. There’s no word on whether this will be a new model, perhaps an RX 9070 XTX, or an amendment to existing RX 9070 XT cards. The former seems more likely as RX 9070 XT stock is already sitting with retailers featuring 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM running on a 256-bit bus. Should this card come to light, the leaker expects this 32GB GPU to appear in the first half of 2025, likely after the launch of RX 9070 Series cards.
Unless AMD has a new GPU up its sleeve, this card will probably use the Navi 48 chip. The company hasn’t announced official specifications for the die, but rumours claim it’ll pack 4,096 streaming processors and feature a boost clock of 2,970MHz. However, some retail listings for Radeon RX 9070 XT claim otherwise, with clocks topping out at 2,450MHz.
In lieu of a major GPU redesign, a clamshell approach could facilitate an increase from 16GB to 32GB on Radeon RX 9070 XT. While this doesn’t require a large bus width, it only increases capacity and leaves bandwidth unchanged making the change pointless in some scenarios. More VRAM doesn’t always equal more performance at higher resolutions but it can alleviate memory constraints for a graphics card which in turns nets higher frame rates as is the case with the likes of GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB and Radeon RX 7600 XT.
For professional tasks, 32GB of VRAM will be a welcome boost. That’s more room to handle large data sets and/or accelerate AI workloads but the speed of this memory will be lower than the competition. As a reminder, AMD will likely use older, slower GDDR6 chips compared to Nvidia’s newer, faster GDDR7 stock. Of course, higher performance usually incurs a higher cost and value could still be on Team Red’s side.
