It is now official that AMD's long-anticipated RDNA 4 series will hit shelves early next month, as confirmed by Dr. Lisa Su during AMD's recent Q4 24 earnings call. RDNA 4 will debut with the RX 9070 series, including the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 non-XT, which are expected to be followed by budget models later. This confirmation ties in with rumors of a looming RDNA 4 launch event by the end of this month, where we're likely to hear more about performance and pricing.
" Our focus with this generation is to address the highest volume portion of the enthusiast gaming market with our new RDNA 4 architecture. RDNA 4 delivers significantly better ray tracing performance and adds support for AI powered upscaling technology that will bring high quality 4K gaming to mainstream players when the first Radeon 9070-series GPUs go on sale in early March” - Dr. Lisa Su
Team Red's Q4 financials appear largely positive, with substantial gains in net revenue year-over-year in the datacenter and client markets. The gaming segment seems to have taken a large hit, primarily due to lackluster Radeon discrete GPU and console chip sales. Dr. Lisa Su addressed the disappointing performance of the gaming segment, asserting that next-gen Radeon RX 9000 GPUs will target the "highest volume portion" of the market; referring to the mid-range segment. AMD made it clear a couple of months back that it has no plans to compete with Nvidia in the high-end space with RDNA 4. Instead, the goal of this generation is to penetrate the budget market, mirroring a strategy similar to RDNA 1.
For starters, AMD has pinned a lot of emphasis on ML-driven upscaling to match or even beat Nvidia's DLSS with FSR 4. Not much has been shared about the frame generation counterpart of FSR 4, so it'll be interesting to see how it holds up versus Nvidia's MFG (Multi Frame Gen) technology. Nonetheless, AMD is marketing the RX 9070 series as 4K-capable, likely when combined with upscaling which should give the RTX 5070 series a run for its money.
"...when the first Radeon 9070 series GPUs go on sale in early March."
Dr. Lisa Su (Earnings Call Transcript)
Nvidia will charge $749 for 16GB of VRAM on the RTX 5070 Ti, provided you can get one at MSRP. Both the RX 9070 XT and its non-XT counterpart are rumored to offer 16GB of VRAM, with the latter reportedly within 5% of the RTX 4080 in raster performance. In its marketing material at CES, AMD confirmed the existence of an RX 9060 series. Dr. Lisa Su's statement exclusively mentions the RX 9070 series, hence it is reasonable to infer that budget models will arrive later, possibly in time for Computex in May.
