AMD Radeon RX 8000 GPU emerges in Geekbench benchmarks — Navi 48 GPU with 56 RDNA 4 CUs at 2.1 GHz and 16GB VRAM

RDNA 3 Silicon
RDNA 3 Silicon (Image credit: AMD)

Early this morning, a series of Geekbench OpenCL benchmarks for an AMD Radeon RX 8000-series GPU, which will rival the best graphics cards, was uploaded and subsequently caught the attention of leakers and outlets across the web. Hardware detective BenchLeaks discovered multiple entries of this mysterious "gfx1201" GPU that expose some of its specifications.

The gfx1201 device ID had previously appeared in AMD's ROCm Validation Suite in April. The same patches confirmed Navi 48 as "gfx1201" and Navi 44 as "gfx1200", but these benchmarks all only seem to be for "gfx1201".

The Navi 48-based graphics card, with a very conservative clock speed, completed the benchmark at 2.1 GHz. The graphics card is probably an engineering sample, which would explain the low clock speed. Some existing Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards feature a boost clock speed of up to 2.5 GHz. RDNA 4, potentially on a newer node, should have no problems reaching the same heights, if not surpassing it. The gfx1201 graphics card seems to have 16GB of memory. Unfortunately, Geekbench doesn't specify the memory type or speed, but it is likely GDDR6. Now, 16GB of GDDR6 implies that the gfx1201 should have a 256-bit memory interface.

Sadly, the benchmark results don't tell us anything conclusive. Where things get a little odd, though, is in the spread of the results—four of the five results are somewhat expected variance, but the earliest, lowest result (12,962) exhibits less than half the performance of the same hardware in the latest four results (ranging from 31,041 to 33,241). 

Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.