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.
318 Comments on AMD Debuts Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 Powered by RDNA 4, and FSR 4
All else being equal, open standards are better. There's nothing wrong with having rooted for FSR on that basis. And in fact, historically, open standards tend to win. VHS won out over Betamax. The CD won out over the Mini-Disc. The PC defeated the Macintosh. If we're discussing the GPU wars, Freesync was ultimately vindicated, and PhysX dwindled to obscurity.
(I still loved my Betamax, though.)
In this case, it just so happens that AMD's open standard couldn't compete with Nvidia's closed standard on image quality. But it got pretty close, and I'm glad they tried. Whatever else you want to say about the tech itself or the motivations behind its design, FSR represents a significant value add for consumers of all shapes or sizes. I wish AMD luck on their new proprietary tech, but they're going to need more than "we've got DLSS too" to move the needle substantially on their position in the GPU market.Exactly right.
2. They priced multiple sku too high leading to negative feedback and then their price tanking. People can view this however they want but even AMD admits this much.
Are the two main things they did poorly but AMD said so themselves multiple products they released specifically the 7600/7700XT/7900XT were poorly received and they would like to fix that. Which is a good thing.
Performance has also regressed over time the best AMD card is now 50% slower in RT vs the 4080 and it loses to a card that was 200 usd cheaper and has been retired because even Nvidia wanted something better at it's price point which isn't a good look either. FSR hasn't really improved over RDNA3 lifetime.
And now they are in the awkward position of not improving raster for at least another generations and hopefully catching last generation Nvidia products in the same tier in RT while doing something their most diehard fans hate potentially locking FSR4 to RDNA4 although I think if they can make it work on RDNA3 and older they will backtrack on this.@freeagent seems like he gets the most heat from my observation but what I wouldn't do to be a fly on the wall of your pms from users lmao especially the reports.... Well the mods in general not just you lol.
Actually I'm surprised about the 5070 Ti and 5070 so they were lowered $50, although it would've been nice to be at a $700 or $500, but meh. At least the RX 9070 XT would be around maybe $600 now.
Showing false benchmark results at launch is really poor, but people should know better than to believe marketing hype, and look for real reviews before buying. That doesn't affect the end product in any way, imo.
RT didn't improve because they basically used RDNA 2's RT engine. They spent all their R&D on chiplets and improving raster, neither of which paid off really well. But that still didn't make the end products bad, just not as much better than RDNA 2 as we'd hoped. Now, they're doing the opposite: they're trying to improve RT and the video engine while only doing minor fixes on raster, and backtracking on the chiplet design. I'm curious if it'll pay off, this is why I'm disappointed that we didn't get more detail.Oh so they've been announced now? What a shame for AMD... The 5070 is coming and the 9070 XT is nowhere in sight.
Also, AI TOPS? That's how we measure GPU performance now? *Facepalm*
…welcome to 2007 when CUDA was released, I heard Crysis is gonna be mighty impressive and I seriously can’t wait for The Orange Box.
No, seriously, this isn’t new. The writing was on the wall for almost two decades.
:D
Just when I thought it couldn't get worse than the AMD keynote. *Sigh*
Also, FSR4 being hardware locked to rx9000 means no more excuses, it really has to step up in image quality.
This Nvidia announcement isn’t a stomping, it’s a shredding. A year from now AMD will have 5% market share from their loyalists and that’s it.
Radeon is dead. Long live Radeon.