Next-gen AMD RDNA 4 GPUs reportedly won't compete with Nvidia at the high end

pcgamer.com:

AMD's next-gen RDNA 4 graphics won't compete with Nvidia at the high end. So, says the latest rumour from Twitter poster Kepler. Cue mass hysteria among PC enthusiasts, cats and dogs living together, basically the end of days. Superficially, it sounds like very bad news. But is it, is it actually?

Twitter account Kepler is one of the more reliable sources of graphics tech leaks, so the post certainly should be taken on some merit. But what does it mean if it is actually true? Broadly, there are two interpretations, one pretty positive, the other pretty much a catastrophe.

Interpretation one says that high-end GPUs are irrelevant to 99 percent of gamers and that AMD focussing on affordable graphics cards is actually a good thing. Give us 75 percent of the performance of a high-end Nvidia GPU for half the money, AMD, and everything looks pretty sweet.

Maybe that should be half the performance for a quarter of the money, these days. Whatever, the basic idea makes sense and AMD has form in this regard. It was only two generations ago that AMD didn't bother at the high end, limiting its RDNA 1 family to the Radeon RX 5700 XT and pricing it between the Nvidia RTX 2060 and 2070 cards.

AMD did pretty much the same thing with its GCN-based Polaris chips in the Radeon RX 400 and 500 series. The RX 480 launched in summer 2016 at $239, shortly after Nvidia wheeled out its mighty $659 GeForce GTX 1080. The RX 580 and latterly RX 590 were the same. They didn't take the fight to Nvidia at the high end.

Go back even further to the still-just-about-ATI era and the Radeon HD 4870 of 2008, and something similar happened. That card clocked in at $299 to Nvidia's GeForce GTX 280 at $650.

With all that in mind, AMD not bothering at the high