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.
339 Comments on AMD Debuts Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 Powered by RDNA 4, and FSR 4
Consoles, handhelds and stupid AI markets are better for their pockets, at the moment.
1. Tried drastically to improve their Linux drivers.
2. Announced that they are making their own APU.
I have even seen comments like raster is dead and AI is going to replace raster. In the real world none of those features work before raster.
As much as people are still trying to defend Nvidia's pricing the best selling GPU on Newegg.ca is still the 6600. There was a time when the 6700XT was the recommended choice but when the 7900 series launched they called the 7900XT the 6800XT and when the 7800XT launched they called that the 6700XT replacement. Distributors then priced these cards as high as they could but when the As Rock 7900XT was $839 Canadian it sold out pretty fast.
Then you have AMD software. On more than one occasion someone has made a comment about what AMD does not have that a screenshot solves. Then there is City Skylines 2. I currently have a population of 1,100,000. The Game supports DLSS but no FSR. Ok let's go into AMD software and turn on Hyper Rx with 1 click. What is this a 1,100,000 city and the map scrolling is smooth and vehicles are smooth. What is that the FPS are 50 to 70 at 4K? While DLSS4 is in 75 Games I can do that with my Entire library.
None of what I have said above is conjecture and you can grab a copy of City Skylines 2 and try for yourself. In fact I am going to ask on the 7000 user's thread what Games people struggle with. That is the only Game that needs Hyper RX in my library that I play regularly though.
I honestly feel that the narrative is what made AMD do what it did. We don't have any numbers though so everything we wax on about is just our thoughts on what these cards can do.
Faster than a 4080 Super in Raster and a few points off the 7900XTX in RT? Sign me up!
People on positions of power”power” pushing their bias to those looking for purchasing guidance.
Thats the main reason why Ngreedia is enjoying an almost absolute monopoly in pc gaming.
Here on TPU a review will come out for a GPU. The AMD variant will be near the top but people will tell you that AMD cannot do it. Like when Intel praised their 580 vs the 4060 and 7600. They even made VRAM a focus and the reviewers agreed, until we found that they don't work good with budget CPUs. Meanwhile the 7600XT is waiting for a price drop to become the budget card to get with 16 GB of VRAM.
On another note, at the 1 minute mark, it says that Steve was banned from CES, not sure why:
I’m curious why it needs 3 since the power consumption it’s rumored to be low enough to only need 2.
Meanwhile some designers (and engineers) can.
There are reasons you don't cram tons of power rail into confined spaces.
There are more reasons to not do it with higher resistance cables.
Maybe the connector is okay for duty that are technically between single and dual 8-pin jobs.
I'm not pumping 300W+ through it and calling it safe. Good on AMD letting us experiment with that.
In a world of rampant ignorance, moral imbeciles and mass menhera, people just have to learn the hard way.
Save it, screenshot it, YTMND it. Save it for a future meme compilation. It is NOT going to age well.