AMD Navi 44-based RX 9000 GPUs Might Not be Ideal for Streamers and Content Creators Due to the Absence of Hardware Encoders
AMD’s upcoming RDNA 4 GPU lineup is going to contain GPUs based on the Navi 48 and Navi 44 dies. While the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 will be AMD’s best bet for the GPU market, the budget and lower-end cards don’t seem to bring anything substantial, both performance and hardware-wise.
Even though it’s a bit early to say such things, a rumor is circulating around the Navi 44 GPU that suggests the graphics cards with this die won’t be featuring any hardware encoders. It’s not official but the prominent leaker @Kepler_L2 says that the N44 ‘might’ not have HW encoders. This can be believable since the Radeon RX 6500 XT misses HW encoders, which are essential for video encoding.
In one of the recent leaks regarding the Navi 44 GPU, reports say that these GPUs will bring both 128-bit and 96-bit memory bus widths, and considering that 96-bit is pretty narrow, such GPUs will be limited in hardware capabilities compared to the higher-end cards. AMD typically disables additional features such as hardware encoders on entry-level GPUs such as the RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6500 XT, which skipped hardware encoders and was designated as the worst GPU at the time of launch by many.
If the same story repeats, the lower-end RDNA 4 RX 9000 cards may not appeal to the masses since streaming and content creation will be almost impossible on such cards and users will have to rely on the CPU encoding. The lower-end and budget Navi 44 GPUs are a rare sight in the leaks while the RX 9070 XT based on Navi 48 leaks almost daily in one way or another.
Therefore, nothing is confirmed yet but at the same time, there is a possibility. Radeon RX 9000 GPUs with Navi 44 die will supposedly fall in the $179-$349 range, which means direct competition to the 600-class cards like RX 7600, RX 7600 XT, etc. Apart from missing hardware encoders, the raster performance will be crucial as Navi 44 GPUs will go against Intel’s latest Arc B580 GPU, featuring 12 GB of VRAM at $249, and the RTX 5050 and 5060 GPUs scheduled to launch in Q1 2025.
