Not that we were expecting anything else, but new trade body listings confirm that AMD's RX 7600 and Nvidia's RTX 4060 Ti graphics cards are both imminent. And both will run with just 8GB of graphics memory.
The listings are posted on the Eurasian Economic Commission's website, which is the governing body of the Eurasian Economic Union, which roughly speaking is a former Soviet bloq equivalent of the EU.
Anyway, one listing for ASRock includes entries for the RX 7600 indicating 8GB of graphics memory, while another for Gigabyte has both the RX 7600 and Nvidia's RTX 4060 Ti, both running 8GB of graphics memory.
The listings also imply that these cards will be launched shortly and indeed the expectation for some time is that both cards will appear later in May just before the Computex tech trade fair, or possibly at the fair itself at the beginning of June.
The big remaining unknown is pricing. And it will be pricing and how it combines with those 8GB frame buffers that defines these cards. As we've reported previously, games that breach the 8GB barrier, even running at just 1080p, are becoming more widespread.
If these new cards are super affordable, the fact that they may run into occasional VRAM issues will be acceptable. But if they're positioned in line with the current trend for sky-high GPU prices, 8GB will be much harder to tolerate. Put it this way, a $400 GPU with just 8GB? No thanks.
Of course, the problem for both cards is that there really is no option other than 8GB. Both are said to run 128-bit memory buses, and current graphics memory is available in 1GB and 2GB module formats, both with 32-bit interfaces.
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That means you have the option of either 4GB or 8GB on a 128-bit board. And 4GB is a total non-starter. 12GB of memory would require a 192-bit bus and 16GB a 256-bit bus. Increasing the bus width, meanwhile, would require a total redesign of a GPU.
Incidentally, the listings seem to indicate RX 7600 rather than 7600 XT. And we are kinda expecting XT variants at launch, so it's unclear for now whether both XT and non-XT models will be available from the get go.
Anyway, we have a feeling these cards will come in lower, price-wise, than might be expected purely going on the positioning of existing AMD RX 7000 and Nvidia RTX 40-series GPUs, partly due to this specific 8GB concern. That said, we're also expecting Nvidia's RTX 4060 Ti cards to be the faster of the two, so that would imply higher pricing for the Nvidia offering. But we'll know soon enough as both are expected before the end of the month.
