AMD has canceled some GPUs, but don't panic!

SPEND ENOUGH TIME in this game and you get a feel for rumors that are very likely true. And I'm getting the sense that the latest ones suggesting AMD has ditched the high-end variants of its next-gen RDNA 4 graphics family are on the money. At first glance, this seems pretty disastrous, especially given how expensive gaming GPUs have become and how desperately we need somebody to put Nvidia under pressure. But is it? Is it actually?

- Jeremy Laird

The bones of the story go like this. AMD has canceled not only the top Navi 41 GPU but also Navi 42. It’s the mooted cancellation of Navi 42 that’s most worrying. Navi 41, just like Navi 31 and Navi 21 before it, was slated to be the big boy of the RDNA 4 series. It’s the most exciting GPU of the family, but also the least relevant.

That’s because few gamers can afford high-end GPUs. Navi 31 in the form of the Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX were released at the end of last year. But it wasn’t until July that a sole 7900 board, the XTX, appeared in Steam’s Hardware Survey, clocking up a mere 0.17 percent of gamers. If you combine the 7900 XTX with all variants of the previous-gen high-end, the 6800 and 6900 Series based on Navi 21, they don’t even add up to 1 percent.