AMD Radeon 7800 XT emerges in Geekbench, possibly hinting at imminent unveiling

Something to look forward to: As Team Red teases the remainder of the RDNA3 lineup, analysts and customers are speculating about which models will be released first to compete against Nvidia's mid-range RTX 4000 series cards, some of which have yet to arrive. The appearance of the Radeon RX 7800 XT on Geekbench might offer a clue, even if it doesn't reveal a true indication of likely performance.

A Wednesday entry on Geekbench lists the as-yet-unannounced AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT in a Vulkan benchmark. The GPU's score is likely far from the performance of the fully-released card, but its emergence on the site suggests that Team Red could reveal it soon.

AMD CEO Lisa Su recently confirmed that "mainstream" Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards would hit the market this quarter, but did not specify which particular cards. Around the same time, a now-deleted GitHub pull request listed 12 GPUs in the series, both released and unreleased, including the 7800 XT.

Moreover, previous rumors suggest that the 7800 XT, 7700 XT, and 7600 XT will debut at Computex in late May or early June. The more affordable Radeon RX 7600 is likely to emerge first, as Navi 32 and 31 yield issues could delay the release of the 7700 XT and 7800 XT. This situation adds intrigue and anticipation to the 7800 XT's presence on Geekbench.

The card scored 113,819 in a Vulkan test while paired with a 6GHz Ryzen 9 7950X and 58GB of system RAM running Debian Linux. The score is similar to listings for the RTX 3070 or RX 6700 XT and much lower than the card's likely real-world performance.

The system is likely an early internal AMD engineering sample. With the 7800 XT probably still weeks from launch, the drivers are nowhere near ready, and power constraints may also be engaged.

Geekbench doesn't reveal anything about the GPU's specs, but previous information suggests it will use the full Navi 32 die, giving it 60 compute units (7,680 shader units). It's also expected to feature 64MB of Infinity Cache across four memory dies and 16GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6 VRAM with a 250-to-285-watt TBP. The 7800 XT would likely compete with the RTX 4070 Ti.

Whichever new RDNA 3 GPUs Team Red releases first and regardless of their performance, they are expected to invigorate the market for new mainstream graphics cards, following customers' lukewarm response to Team Green's RTX 4070. Nvidia could limit that card's supply due to slow sales, and the RTX 4060 might not impress users either.