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Alleged AMD RX 7500 prototype surfaces with 1,536 shaders and 6GB VRAM

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Navi 33 XE silicon smiles for the camera

Alleged AMD Radeon RX 7500
(Image credit: X/GOK)

Photographs of a cancelled AMD RX 7000-series prototype have reportedly surfaced on X. According to GOKForFree, the GPU seems to be a working sample of what could have been the Radeon RX 7500. When tested using GPU-Z, it was shown to have 6GB of memory with a 96-bit bus, 1,536 shading units, and 64 ROPs.

By comparison, the AMD Radeon RX 7600 has 8GB of GDDR6 memory with a 128-bit bus, 2,048 shading units, and 64 ROPs. The graphics card was an incremental upgrade from the RX 6650 XT and competes directly with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060.

On the other hand, TechPowerUp lists an unreleased AMD Radeon RX 7500 XT with the same memory size as the unknown card, but with fewer shading units (1,024) and ROPs (32). So, it could be that this unknown GPU is the actual RX 7500 XT, with the details listed by TechPowerUp as those for the vanilla RX 7500. After all, it’s unlikely that AMD will release an XT version of a base-spec GPU.

The unearthed card seems like a competitor to Nvidia’s most affordable GPU offering. After all, the RTX 3050 also came in a 6GB variant, with more shaders but only half the ROPs. If Team Green released an RTX 4050 6GB, this GPU would probably comfortably land within the same performance and price bracket. However, because the RTX 4050 desktop GPU never arrived, AMD apparently thought it did not make sense to make an alternative to something that does not exist.

This is all for the better, since a 6GB GPU would age like milk for modern gaming. Even the 8GB variant of the RTX 5060 Ti has been significantly falling behind its 16 GB brother, even encountering performance issues when attached to a PCIe 4.0 slot. So, if AMD released this GPU for the masses, it would only cause pain and misery to penny-pinching gamers.

GOKForFree could not adequately test the GPU, as it could only hit a maximum frequency of 300 MHz. This is likely because it lacks a proper driver, which is hindering the PC from fully utilizing what little muscle it has. This is an interesting view of what could have been AMD’s last sub-$200 GPU, but I still think we should leave it and its 6GBs of VRAM in the past.

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Jowi Morales
Jowi Morales
Contributing Writer

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Pemalite
    Would have loved to have seen this drop.

    I think the biggest thing missing in the GPU market right now is low-power, low-cost GPU's.

    I have seen some SFF PC's that would have new-life breathed into them if I could upgrade the integrated graphics for a single-slot, half height GPU... And it's not just about gaming, it's about media encode/decode, GPU compute etc'.

    Yes 6GB of Ram sucks, but for eSports games it would have been fine at 720P-1080P, it's a budget card, not a 1440P ultra spec card.
    Reply
  • usertests
    Pemalite said:
    Yes 6GB of Ram sucks, but for eSports games it would have been fine at 720P-1080P, it's a budget card, not a 1440P ultra spec card.
    AMD made the exact card we all want for SFF. It's the W7500:

    https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/workstations/radeon-pro/w7500.htmlhttps://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-w7500.c4170https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/amd-radeon-pro-w7500
    Small cut down, the full 8 GB of VRAM, although slower VRAM and less bandwidth, single slot, and only a 70W TDP.

    The catch is that it's a PRO card, costing $429 at launch, and prices have not slipped ($380+ on ebay, not something reasonable like $150). But AMD can 100% make a card like this out of Navi 33 or Navi 44 if they choose to.
    Reply
  • jlake3
    Pemalite said:
    Would have loved to have seen this drop.

    I think the biggest thing missing in the GPU market right now is low-power, low-cost GPU's.

    I have seen some SFF PC's that would have new-life breathed into them if I could upgrade the integrated graphics for a single-slot, half height GPU... And it's not just about gaming, it's about media encode/decode, GPU compute etc'.

    Yes 6GB of Ram sucks, but for eSports games it would have been fine at 720P-1080P, it's a budget card, not a 1440P ultra spec card.
    I'm with you that a low-power, SFF GPU could be something neat and different in the market and would fill a niche... but from what I've seen of the online tech community over the last year or so, there's absolutely no way the reception to this would have been anything but horribly, horribly negative.

    If it beat the 3050 6gb while costing less and made the A310/A380 absolutely irrelevant at their current prices, rather than celebrate the improvement in the budget/SFF space, it would get panned for not moving the needle enough. People would come out of the woodwork to one-up each other about how it should be named lower, have more VRAM, and cost less, all at the same time. AIBs wouldn't stick to single slot/half height/no power cable designs. Reviewers would compare it to a new build with a top-end APU and deem it a bad value by that metric, ignoring that I can't just drop one of those APUs into my cheap 8th-to-10th-gen Intel prebuilt.

    And after all that bad PR, I'm not sure how many salvage yields they'd actually have that would work as a RX 7500 but not make the cut for a W7500 or RX 7600M/7600S.
    Reply
  • usertests
    jlake3 said:
    People would come out of the woodwork to one-up each other about how it should be named lower, have more VRAM, and cost less, all at the same time.
    All true, really. 8 GB would match the W7500 and give an easy win over the 3050 6GB. It should be named lower than the W7500 if it couldn't include 8 GB. 3050 6GB pricing is very high for what it is, so I would hope AMD could come in below it.

    I think the big reviewers have the self-awareness to realize that a ~70-75W competitor to the 3050 6GB can and should exist, at the right price. The VRAM complaints are primarily about 8 GB cards above $300, and soon at $300 (5060 12GB is always looming over the 5060 8GB).

    An 8 GB SFF card would be better than 6 GB, but if it was below $200, the complaints wouldn't be so bad because there are very few competitors to compare it to: the 3050 6GB and A380 also have 6 GB, some expensive professional cards have more, and then you get into older/weaker cards, often with 4 GB.

    I assume RX 7300/7500 is a no go at this point, but hopefully the RX 9040 can become real.
    jlake3 said:
    AIBs wouldn't stick to single slot/half height/no power cable designs.
    I don't think it is common for 75W tier GPUs to be supplied with additional power. I didn't notice that for the 3050 6GB, and it might be a policy enforced by AMD/Nvidia/Intel when they make these cards. The big problem I've seen from AMD is that they pump up the clocks and raise TDP on the cheap junk like the 6500 XT to squeeze out a little more performance, depriving PCIe-only users of another option. It was only recently that the sub-75W RX 6500 apparently became a thing.

    Since there are reports of the RTX 5050 using 130 Watts, and the 6500 XT used 107 Watts, I assume AMD would do the same with an RX 9050. Only the RX 9040 or below can save this niche.

    I am worried that single slot/half height is harder to obtain than it should be. Particularly low profile/half height, which I believe is the more common constraint. I think I could do dual-slot in the case I'm looking at, but it needs to be low profile. Both single slot and low profile would make it more useful though.
    Reply