As per Moore's Law Is Dead's latest report, one of the engineering sample informally called the "RX 9080 XT ES" is causing some internal waves inside the AMD. Although nothing is actually in the booklet, this test card suggests that it might be working on an even more potent version of its current flagship RDNA4, the RX 9070 XT, to possibly compete with the new RTX 5080 Super from NVIDIA.
This engineering sample isn't expected to disappoint. According to inside lab tests, this GPU reached game clocks that were between a blistering 3.4 and 3.7 GHz. That's some serious speed
As far as memory goes, we're looking at a 256-bit wide GDDR7 interface and configurations tested with up to an impressive 32 GB of VRAM. Other samples are said to peddle 16GB and 24GB variants. To fuel this kind of performance the card is apparently quite thirsty, coming close to but well over-and-some units pushed beyond-450 watts under load.
Moore's Law Is Dead has early unofficial benchmark info that is exciting. The graphics card will average "RX 9080 XT ES" performance enhancement over the already established RX 9070 XT by about 28% when it comes to 4K resolution. In particular operations, that increase is said to jump as high as 45%
On corroboration of these numbers, this upcoming AMD card would then be pitched directly against NVIDIA's RTX 5080 Super and, possibly, even in contention with the mighty RTX 4090, depending on shipping clocks at the end and how it's brought up. Highly speculative at this stage, of course.
It seems, however, that AMD would not be up for reinventing the wheel with this GPU based on that more refined architecture of Navi 48: rather than full-on, crazy redesign, simply gonna try and push it up further in clock speed while improving memory bandwidth, all under a traditional monolithic chip. It is possible that AMD is using very advanced manufacturing processes from TSMC: possibly N4X or even N3X. Considering AMD has earlier confirmed road maps, including N2X and even down to 1.4nm nodes for future CPUs, for sure, this would be plausible with how they would use the cutting-edge tech for their GPUs.
Moore's Law Is Dead puts this perspective forward: if this card launches, then chances are quite high that it would benefit from a strategy similar to that of the Radeon VII - basically, it came early with a die-shrunk version of Vega to lead NVIDIA in its transition to 7nm-a long time ago in the day. Still, no word from AMD on any launch plan.
It might remain just an internal test unit unless the company deems it a necessary proposition in the face of good market opportunity, or heats up enough competitively. The final call might also end up being tied to the timing of FSR4 (codenamed Redstone), AMD's next-gen upscaling technology, becoming fully ready. Sources imply that AMD might like an RX 9080 XT fitness with a potential release with better FSR as that compelling high-end push. Time will tell as to whether this production-ready engineering sample will see daylight in gamers' hands.