Rumor mill: This year’s Radeon 9000 series graphics cards delivered impressive performance gains from AMD in the mid-range and mainstream market segments. However, the company chose not to compete at the very high-end categories for this generation. Although Team Red is unlikely to challenge Nvidia’s flagship products in the near future, a new GPU expected to launch next year may outperform the RTX 5080.

AMD is expected to introduce a new enthusiast-class graphics card in the second half of 2026. Based on the company’s upcoming UDNA architecture, also known as RDNA 5, its configuration will closely resemble that of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. Prominent leaker KeplerL2, who has a solid track record, speculated about the GPU’s specifications in a series of recent posts on the AnandTech forums.

While the RX 9070 XT, the fastest GPU in the RDNA 4 generation, can outperform Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5070 Ti in certain scenarios, AMD did not attempt to rival the RTX 5080, let alone the RTX 5090. However, the next lineup is expected to resemble RDNA 3 featuring a halo product that outperforms Nvidia’s 5080. The GPU won’t compete with the hypothetical RTX 6090 but could trade blows with a 6080.

Similar to the 7900 XTX, the upcoming high-end AMD GPU will likely include 96 compute units and a 384-bit memory bus. A mid-range version is expected to offer 64 compute units and a 256-bit memory bus, resembling the 9070 XT. A mainstream option might be similar to the 9060 XT, with 32 compute units and a 128-bit bus.

According to sources familiar with AMD’s hardware roadmap, Kepler previously estimated that UDNA will improve raster performance by approximately 20 percent over RDNA 4 and double its ray tracing capabilities. RDNA 4 already represents a significant leap in ray tracing over its predecessor.

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Our benchmarks show that the Radeon RX 9070 XT outperforms the 7900 XTX in ray tracing despite sitting an entire weight class below it in traditional rasterization. A UDNA-based GPU with the same configuration as the 7900 XTX could become a ray tracing powerhouse and may even address Radeon’s lingering disadvantage against GeForce in path tracing.

Meanwhile, AMD’s UDNA architecture is also expected to power the PlayStation 6 and the next Xbox console. A recently leaked die shot suggests that Microsoft’s upcoming console includes 80 compute units, potentially outperforming the RTX 5080. With a projected price exceeding $1,000 (unlikely but that’s the rumor these days), the console appears to target the pre-built PC market instead of the traditional console market.