AMD's Navi 44: Smaller GPU signals big changes for budget graphics cards

AMD's upcoming Navi 44 GPU, part of the RDNA 4 lineup, is rumored to be much smaller than the one before it. 

Based on some leaked shipping info, the Navi 44 is said to be about 29 x 29 mm, which adds up to around 841 square mm. That’s about 31 percent smaller than Navi 33, which was 35 x 35 mm. But even though it’s shrunk, it’s still about 25 percent bigger than Navi 24.

The Navi 44 chip is expected to power AMD’s lower-end Radeon 8000 series cards, while its bigger sibling, Navi 48, will power higher-end models.

AMD is expected to showcase its top-of-the-line RDNA 4 cards at CES 2025 in January, but the models using Navi 44 will probably hit the shelves later, sometime in the second quarter of the year.

This Radeon 8000 lineup will compete with NVIDIA’s Blackwell-based GPUs. Although we don’t have exact numbers yet, some in the industry think AMD might not aim to compete directly with NVIDIA’s flagship RTX 5090.

On the flip side, NVIDIA isn’t sitting around, either. Their RTX 50 series is coming in early 2025 with some hefty upgrades, like up to 36GB of GDDR7 memory and blazing-fast bandwidth of 1,536 GB/s, which could mean a big leap from the current RTX 40 series.

AMD’s move to make the Navi 44 smaller might indicate that they focus on more efficient and compact designs for entry-level graphics cards.