New rumors suggest that AMD's next graphics card will be in our hands sometime in September, but how excited we are about that depends on how much we believe the recently leaked 3DMark performance numbers.

Relatively reliable Twitter leaker All The Watts (via Appuals) posted a screenshot purporting to show the performance of a Radeon RX 7800 running 3DMark Time Spy. And it was slower than the Radeon RX 6800 XT, scoring only 18% higher than the average score of the RX 6800 non-XT.

She states that it runs more efficiently at 260W of power consumption, but it still consumes more power than the equivalent Nvidia GPU, the RTX 4070. And whether the 260W figure is peak power consumption or the average of the RX 7800, it is the same.

The RTX 4070, however, has a lower 3DMark Time Spy score, but its peak power consumption is 230W and its average power consumption is under 200W.

While Nvidia may not be hugely pleased with how well rounded the new generation of Ada graphics cards are, they are at least approaching the full stack of new GPUs. However, there are still only two cards in AMD's Radeon RX 7000 series, the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX. [However, it is interesting to note that while rumors are touting leaked performance figures, the heart of the RX 7800 cards, the GPU configuration, is still not 100% known.

Previous rumors have suggested that the RX 7800 may ship using a cut-down version of the Navi 31 used in the previously released RX 7900 series cards, as opposed to using the Navi 32, the expected lower-specification chiplet GPU. Given the existence of a Radeon Pro W7800 with this styling, such rumors are credible.

However, a video posted over the weekend from the MILD YouTube channel suggests that the Navi 31 card is not likely to launch anytime soon and that what will launch in September will be a Navi 32 GPU with 60 compute units (CUs) and 48 or 54 CUs They claim. If the RX 7800 card in the 3DMark Time Spy leak is indeed this 60 CU part, it will have essentially the same core configuration as the RX 6800 before it.

With a mere 18% improvement in 3DMark performance and virtually the same power consumption, the new generation of cards does not necessarily feel like spectacular results from the new RDNA 3 architecture. It is worth remembering, however, that this is AMD's first nominal chiplet GPU design.

Ultimately, it will likely come down to price. As ever in the world of modern graphics cards.

If AMD launches the RX 7800 at the same price as the RX 6800's launch price of $579, it will be at least $20 less than the competing RTX 4070 and could offer higher rasterized gaming performance. Nvidia has announced that it will support DLSS and Frame Generation and will argue that ray tracing capabilities are far superior in games that support them.

However, if AMD wants to be bullish, it could introduce a new card at the same $499 price point as the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB card and laugh as hard as it can. This would require AMD to mass produce the card, but such aggressive pricing has not been seen in AMD's recent history. Therefore, when the RX 7800 is released, we expect it to carry the same $550+ price tag as it currently does.