Monday, January 6th 2025
AMD Debuts Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 Powered by RDNA 4, and FSR 4
AMD at the 2025 International CES announced the Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 desktop performance-segment graphics cards. These will be the face of AMD's next generation of gaming graphics products, and will be powered by the new RDNA 4 graphics architecture. AMD hopes to launch both cards within Q1 2025. AMD changed the nomenclature of its gaming GPUs mainly because it has made a tactical retreat from the enthusiast graphics segment, its fastest products will compete in the performance segment. From the way AMD arranged the Radeon RX 9070 series and 9060 series product stack against the backdrop of the Radeon RX 7000 series, the GeForce RTX 4000 series, and the anticipated GeForce RTX 5000 series, the RX 9070 XT will offer performance roughly similar to the Radeon RX 7900 XT in raster, with the RX 9070 being slightly faster than the RX 7800 XT. The RX 9060 XT will beat the RX 7700 XT, while the RX 9060 beats the RX 7600 XT.
With RDNA 4, AMD claims generational SIMD performance increase on the RDNA 4 compute units. The 2nd Gen AI accelerators will boast of generational performance increase, and AMD will debut a locally-accelerated generative AI application down the line, called the AMD Adrenalin AI, which can generate images, summarize documents, and perform some linguistic/grammar tasks (rewriting), and serve as a chatbot for answering AMD-related queries. This is basically AMD's answer to NVIDIA Chat RTX. AMD's 3rd Gen Ray accelerator is expected to reduce the performance cost of ray tracing, by putting more of the ray tracing workload through dedicated hardware, offloading the SIMD engine. Lastly, AMD is expected to significantly upgrade the media acceleration and display I/O of its GPUs.
AMD also announced FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4), which has been developed for RDNA 4 (not sure if it will work on older generations of Radeon). It introduces a new machine learning (ML) based upscaling component to handle Super Resolution. This will be paired with Frame Generation, and an updated Anti-Lag 2, to make up the FSR 4 feature-set. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is confirmed to be one of the first titles to utilize FSR 4.
Nearly all AMD add-in board partners (AIBs) are ready with Radeon 9070 series graphics cards, including Acer, ASRock, ASUS, GIGABYTE, Sapphire, PowerColor, XFX, Vastarmor, and Yeston. MSI seems to have discontinued being an AMD AIB.
We also got our first peek at what the "Navi 48" GPU powering the Radeon RX 9070 series looks like—it features an unusual rectangular die with a 2:1 aspect ratio, which seems to lend plausibility to the popular theory that the "Navi 48" is two "Navi 44" dies joined at the hip with full cache-coherency. The GPU is rumored to feature a 256-bit GDDR6 memory interface, and 64 compute units (4,096 stream processors). The "Navi 44," on the other hand, is exactly half of this (128-bit GDDR6, 32 CU). AMD is building the "Navi 48" and "Navi 44" on the TSMC N4P (4 nm EUV) foundry node, on which it is building pretty much its entire current-generation, from mobile processors, to CPU chiplets.
With RDNA 4, AMD claims generational SIMD performance increase on the RDNA 4 compute units. The 2nd Gen AI accelerators will boast of generational performance increase, and AMD will debut a locally-accelerated generative AI application down the line, called the AMD Adrenalin AI, which can generate images, summarize documents, and perform some linguistic/grammar tasks (rewriting), and serve as a chatbot for answering AMD-related queries. This is basically AMD's answer to NVIDIA Chat RTX. AMD's 3rd Gen Ray accelerator is expected to reduce the performance cost of ray tracing, by putting more of the ray tracing workload through dedicated hardware, offloading the SIMD engine. Lastly, AMD is expected to significantly upgrade the media acceleration and display I/O of its GPUs.
We also got our first peek at what the "Navi 48" GPU powering the Radeon RX 9070 series looks like—it features an unusual rectangular die with a 2:1 aspect ratio, which seems to lend plausibility to the popular theory that the "Navi 48" is two "Navi 44" dies joined at the hip with full cache-coherency. The GPU is rumored to feature a 256-bit GDDR6 memory interface, and 64 compute units (4,096 stream processors). The "Navi 44," on the other hand, is exactly half of this (128-bit GDDR6, 32 CU). AMD is building the "Navi 48" and "Navi 44" on the TSMC N4P (4 nm EUV) foundry node, on which it is building pretty much its entire current-generation, from mobile processors, to CPU chiplets.
337 Comments on AMD Debuts Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 Powered by RDNA 4, and FSR 4
what I find funny though is hardware locking fsr4, this has to come as a cognitive shock to people who thought FSR2/3 has been open because AMD wants older cards to have equal features.
if this, by chance, gets beat by $550 5070, it's gonna be really disappointing, at least for mid/upper-mid range buyers like me.
that said, nvidia never showed 5070-5080 numbers, and 5090 is the only one shown because it has a hefty core count upgrade over 4090.
imo it looks like 5070 will be 4070 + 25%, nothing earth shattering, 4070TiS performance at $250 less.
Information comes from developers that were supposed show their wares. If you know the forums where the AA and AAA devs hang out you can see their posts that they had already arrived in Vegas before they were told of the change of plans.
Radeon division is in crisis mode. Don’t be surprised if RDNA 4 gets delayed to mid-year.
And since 5070 is at 549$ now, I wasn't far off - the 9070xt should be 399-449$ at the most, and that's assuming FSR 4 is good and RT is up there.
Nvidia asking what they're asking is fine, but AMD only undercutting it by a small bit is wrong? What's this double standard?The 7900 XTX is 62% faster than the 4070 (according to the TPU database). That's a lot of room for both the 5070 and 9070 XT. We don't know where they land relative to each other.
If fsr4 is indeed only working on amds card, they need a big marketshare to drive this into games.
This whole CES show was a big nothing burger GPU-wise.Not necessarily. If AMD sells 2x as many cards as they did last year, and Nvidia sells 4x as many, then AMD's market share is still in decline. Or if AMD sells only half as many while Nvidia sells only 1/3 as many, then AMD's marketshare is trending up while still operating at a loss. You also didn't consider profit margins in your equation.
Besides, when DLSS came out, I was all against the idea of hardware-dependent software, and was a supporter of open standards. I still am.
Another side of the coin is that closed standards are anti-competitive. If you want X standard, you'll have to buy X product. It's the antithesis of freedom of choice. Sure, it doesn't benefit these companies much, but I'm talking from my perspective as a customer.
Although, considering that basically all consoles use AMD hardware, market adoption of a closed FSR 4 might not be such a big problem even if their desktop GPU market share is low.