Bad news for those waiting for the next Radeon GPUs: AMD RDNA 5 GPUs may still be far away

The next generation of Radeon video cards dedicated to gaming may require at least a year of waiting. Some indications that emerged during Computex 2026 suggest that the GPUs based on the RDNA 5 architecture will not hit the market until 2027, with a real possibility that actual availability could be postponed to the early months of 2028.

The information comes from Tweakers, a Dutch publication that has gathered confessions from various AMD Add-In Board (AIB) partners present at the Taiwanese event. Opinions converge on the idea that the new Radeon generation is still relatively distant, but they diverge on the precise timing. According to one source consulted, the first RDNA 5 models could be introduced between the second and third quarter of 2027. Another manufacturer, however, considers this forecast too optimistic, indicating that a more likely window is between the end of 2027 and the beginning of 2028.

It should also be considered the difference between announcement and commercial availability. AMD could officially present the new architecture by the end of 2027, but several months might pass before the actual arrival of the cards on the shelves, a scenario already observed in the past. For example, RDNA 4 was first shown at CES 2025, while the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 only hit the market in March of the same year. Subsequently, the range was expanded with models like RX 9060 XT and RX 9070 GRE.

Currently, AMD has not communicated any official details about RDNA 5. The rumors circulating so far describe RDNA 5 as a significant evolution compared to the current generation. Among the hypothesized features are improvements in the parallel execution of instructions, including dual-issue execution mechanisms, along with the possibility that AMD will return to cover a broader market segment after the choice made with RDNA 4 to focus primarily on the mainstream and mid-high range segments.

The hypothesized timings for RDNA 5 coincide with those attributed to the future NVIDIA GeForce cards. Current rumors indicate that the next generation following the RTX 5000 series, presumably based on the Rubin architecture, may also debut between the end of 2027 and the beginning of 2028, especially if NVIDIA introduces the SUPER refresh, as rumored in recent days, in the third quarter of this year. If this scenario materializes, AMD and NVIDIA would arrive in the market with their respective new offerings almost simultaneously.

The general context of the semiconductor industry may help explain this apparent stretching of timelines. The growing demand for artificial intelligence accelerators continues to monopolize a significant portion of the design and production resources of the industry's major players, relegating the gaming GPU market to a lower priority compared to investments directed at data centers.