Unlike its desktop CPU department, the AMD graphics division just can not seem to settle on a naming scheme for its discrete graphics cards. The company is once again overhauling what it's going to call its new GPUs. At CES today, alongside new desktop and laptop CPUs and APUs, Team Red has previewed its upcoming RDNA 4 discrete dedicated graphics cards.
AMD went from referring to its cards under HD 7000 series branding to R7/R9 200 series to RX 400 series to RX 5000 series (RDNA 1) in the span of a decade. After sticking to RX 6000 (RDNA 2) and RX 7000 (RDNA3), AMD is tweaking the brand again slightly.
The company did not dive super-deep into the micro-architectural advancements of the new design since this is a preview. And the highlight is mainly the new naming scheme headlined by the RX 9070 XT which will likely be the flagship of this generation.
The company did add that it has made significant improvements to the compute units to boost both IPC (instructions per clock/cycle) as well as the frequency itself with new optimized compute units, with a major focus on AI performance improvement with 2nd Gen AI accelerators as well as improved ray tracing throughput with 3rd gen ray accelerators. The display and media blocks on RDNA 4 has also been upgraded with a new 2nd Gen Radiance Display Engine.
RDNA 3 (RX 7000 series) introduced the ability to process Generalized Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) operations and AMD cards relied on this to hardware-accelerate matrix multiplications, which is one of the basis of AI/ML, with the help of Wave Matrix Multiply Accumulate (WaveMMA or WMMA) instructions.
In gaming, do not expect this to compete with Nvidia's upcoming RTX 5090 or even 5080. Leaked benchmarks (via All the Watts!! on X) have suggested that we are roughly looking at RX 7900 XT or RTX 4070 Ti levels of performance with the 9070 XT and AMD's own slide might be agreeing with it.
But that was always the plan it seems as AMD is going for scale this time over performance crown as the company wants to expand its market share. Jack Huynh, AMD's Senior Vice President & General Manager, Computing and Graphics Group, confirmed this strategy in an interview with Tom's Hardware. Thus AMD will not go toe to toe with Nvidia at the high end this time.
As for why AMD is bringing a new name again, the company says it's updating it to RX 90_0 such that it aligns with the Ryzen 9000 series and also because it will be skipping the RX 8000 series to keep that reserved for RDNA 3.5-based GPUs.
The naming scheme is also trying to be similar to Nvidia's way of calling things and this certainly appears to be a smart move given that the average Joe is much more likely to be familiar with Nvidia's cards since Team Green has stuck to the same branding for a very very long time. Thus, as discussed above, AMD is aligning the RX 9070 series with Nvidia's _070 series and the upcoming RX 9060 series with Nvidia's _060 series.
Finally, AMD says that AIB (add-in-board) RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 variants will start becoming available in Q1 2025 itself. No information on pricing was revealed today.
Aside from the hardware itself, AMD also shared some info about features and software. Radeon is finally getting AI-based image upscaling with FSR 4 and it is exclusive to RDNA 4. Speaking of AI, there are also some new AI features that will be baked into Adrenalin drivers which are meant to help in user workflow.
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