One Leak, Two Numbers: AMD's Rumored RX 10800 XT Beats the RTX 5090 by 15-25%, or 60%
Two September write-ups give AMD's rumored Radeon RX 10800 XT a 15-25% lead over the RTX 5090 and a 60% lead, from one leaker. AMD has announced nothing.
Vlad Makarovreviewed and published
AMD has not announced a graphics card. The rumored Radeon RX 10800 XT has no product page, no price, no launch date and no first-party benchmark. What exists is a September 19 scaling analysis on GameGPU claiming that AMD's next top card could beat Nvidia's RTX 5090 by 15-25% at 4K. A link post carrying the same headline on r/LocalLLaMA drew roughly 260 points and about 116 comments, and the top of that thread is where the claim comes apart.
What the leak actually says
The specifications attributed to the chip, credited by GameGPU to insiders "from Moore's Law is Dead to Kepler_L2", are large: up to 200 Compute Units, a 512-bit memory bus, up to 48 GB of GDDR7, clocks in the 3.1-3.4 GHz range and a 3 nm process.
The 15-25% figure is narrower than the headline. It is explicitly about traditional raster rendering at 4K, without ray tracing and without AI inference. GameGPU's own arithmetic is why the claim needs the qualifier. Nvidia's RTX 5090 uses the GB202 die with 170 active streaming multiprocessors out of 192 physical, at 128 CUDA cores per SM, for 21,760 FP32 cores, plus 170 RT Cores and 680 Tensor Cores. AMD's alleged 200 CUs at 64 stream processors per unit works out to 12,800 ALUs, which is fewer raw shader cores, not more. The case for an advantage rests on extreme clocks, a chiplet design, a large Infinity Cache and 512-bit GDDR7 bandwidth.
The same piece then concedes the point. Against Nvidia's next flagship, the RTX 6090 on Rubin, which GameGPU describes as raising the bar to 192 active SMs and 24,576 CUDA cores, the raster lead is negated and the Rubin card is put 15-20% ahead. Ray tracing is worse for AMD: rough parity in hybrid RT, and a 35-50% deficit in path tracing. The 15-25% is a claim about beating one card, in one rendering mode, before its successor ships.
One leak, three incompatible numbers
Circulating coverage of the same rumor does not agree with itself.
| Version of the claim | Figure | Where it appears |
|---|---|---|
| 4K raster advantage over the RTX 5090 | 15-25% | GameGPU, September 19 |
| Advantage over the RTX 5090 | "30-60%" | Sportskeeda, September 4 |
| Expected price | ~$1,000 up to $2,500 | Sportskeeda, September 4 |
The Sportskeeda article is headlined around the larger number and attributes the 30-60% to "a report published on GameGPU." The only GameGPU article on the RX 10800 XT that existed on September 4 was the August 22 piece, and it contains no percentage at all. Its spec list matches, its price leaks are the useful part, and its stated source is a Moore's Law is Dead YouTube video published on August 21. That video, past 160,000 views, carries a chapter marker at 21:18 titled "THIS is why RDNA 5 will CRUSH Blackwell!" Both percentages, and both price ranges, trace back to a single leaker who the communities reposting him treat as entertainment.
The price divergence is the same problem. The August GameGPU piece puts the RX 10600 at roughly $650-$750 and the RX 10800 XT between $2,000 and $2,500. Sportskeeda renders that as "around $1,000, with some leaks suggesting prices up to $2,500."
The bill for 48 GB
Commenters did the bill-of-materials math. One wrote: "48GB of VRAM alone is over $1200, then the cost of the die/PCB/cooler, this is a $2700+ MSRP card if its real, which its not." The $1,200 figure is roughly what a market-price check returns, and memory contract prices have been climbing for months, which is also why AMD raised prices across its GPU line heading into the fourth quarter.
Set the leaked $2,000-$2,500 against the RTX 5090's $1,999 launch price and it stops looking like a bargain. It looks like one only if you use the 5090's street price, which Sportskeeda puts at $5,000, and which our own coverage found running from $4,399 to a $10,849 bundle after the card left first-party retail. AMD would not be undercutting Nvidia on silicon. It would be undercutting a shortage.
The local-AI angle, honestly
Capacity is the one leaked spec that would change what the card can do rather than how fast it does it. A 48 GB GDDR7 card could hold a 70B-class model in a single device with room left over for context and batching, which 32 GB cannot, and inference decode is bandwidth-bound in exactly the way the leaked 512-bit bus addresses. GameGPU's claim is that this lets AMD's card run larger batches than the 5090 on local models, and load 8K textures that overflow 32 GB.
None of that has a number attached. There is no tokens-per-second measurement, no llama.cpp or vLLM run, and no card to run them on. The historical bottleneck for this class of workload on Radeon has not been memory but the software stack, which is why AMD's last ROCm release mattered more to this audience than any CU count. A 48 GB card with immature kernels is a slower 48 GB card.
What the thread concluded
The skepticism is not subtle. One commenter described the sourcing loop in full: "looks for source of insider leak -> Moore's Law is Dead -> ignores." Another framed the stakes without defending the numbers: "Next gen Radeon is either going to be a ZEN Moment or the leaks are..." Both are community opinion, quoted as such.
What would settle it
Three things would, and none of them is another leak. A real retail launch with board partner models and an actual price. Third-party 4K reviews measuring raster and ray tracing on shipping silicon, not on a compute-unit count. And llama.cpp or vLLM throughput numbers produced on the card itself, published next to the ROCm version that produced them.
Until those exist, the silicon, the percentage and the price are three separate rumors wearing one headline. The specs are plausible and unconfirmed. The percentage is conditional on raster-only 4K and expires against the next Nvidia card. The price is a range wide enough to cover both a bargain and a halo product.
