In PC hardware, plans float in and out, some ship as products, others end up in the trash marked "cba." Let's hope these two recently rumored graphics cards hit the former.

According to komachi_ensaka, a known X leaker, AMD has mentioned two new graphics cards, the Radeon RX 7400 and RX 7300. We have no idea where they appeared or really much more about them, but they would be unexpected developments in a GPU generation that we thought was all wrapped up until now.

The least expensive 7000 series graphics card available today is the RX 7600, but the last one announced was the RX 7600 XT in January. This is virtually the same card as the RX 7600, using the same Navi 33 GPU, but with 16GB of almost meaningless memory.

The RX 7400 and RX 7300 are said to use the same Navi 33 GPU as the RX 7600 XT. This means that 2,048 cores is the absolute maximum configuration available on that GPU, along with a 128-bit bus. However, since the RX 7600 XT and RX 7600 already use all the cores of the GPU, one would expect the RX 7400 or RX 7300 to have far fewer cores than that.

Videocardz speculates that the only competition for either card is AMD's RX 6000 series, whose core count is so small that a much smaller GPU could be on the way: the RX 6400 has only 768, and the RX 6500 XT only 1,024. We could see something similar from these new cards, along with slim memory buses, and even just an architectural transition from RDNA 2 to RDNA 3 would be an improvement

The RX 7600 is $269, often even $250, and perhaps with such a meager core counts, the RX 7400 and RX 7300 will probably cost at least $200 less. With such a poor core count, perhaps the RX 7400 and RX 7300 will fall below at least $200.

Nvidia no longer dabbles in the ultra-low end, but Intel has several older Alchemist generation GPUs at this kind of price point, including the Arc A580 and A380.

The introduction of impressive iGPUs in chips such as the Ryzen 7 8700G, Ryzen 5 8600G, and the very recent Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" chips makes it difficult to recommend ultra-low-cost GPUs. If you need discrete for whatever reason, you can get a 768-core or 512-core RDNA 3 GPU on either desktop APU, but I get it.

The Radeon 890M, a 1,024-core GPU in the laptop HX 370, would be even better in a desktop APU form factor, but no such AM5 chip currently exists. But if your budget is limited, know that there are other options besides ultra-low-budget discrete cards.