While Nvidia is expected to reveal its Blackwell gaming behemoth later in the day, AMD is kicking off CES 2025 with a slew of new announcements pertaining to its latest RDNA 4 architecture. While we are yet to understand all the intricate architecture details, we finally get a taste of what AMD has to offer for gamers this year.
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RDNA 4 comes with FSR 4 and improved ray tracing
AMD is finally unveiling RDNA 4. The new architecture is based on a TSMC 4 nm process and comes with 2nd gen AI accelerators, 3rd gen ray tracing units, and supposedly improved media encoding.
The media encoding improvements should be interesting as AMD's AMF encoder hasn't traditionally matched up to Nvidia's NVENC and Intel QuickSync , and broadcasting software like OBS still do not offer proper AMF support. Hopefully, this changes with RDNA 4.
Also on the anvil is FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4), which now takes advantage of the new AI accelerators in RDNA 4 cards and machine learning (ML) for upscaling.
This could offer potential improvements over FSR 3 that was essentially just upscaling math with the ML aspects only leveraged for fluid motion frames (FMF) frame generation.
AI is also percolating to Radeon Adrenalin with Adrenalin AI. With this, users can generate images, ask for document summaries, and get support information.
New branding for RDNA 4 cards
AMD is also introducing branding changes with the RDNA 4 generation. According to the company, the idea is to mimic the nomenclature used by the competition to ease comparisons for the end user.
With RDNA 4, AMD is confirming that the RX 9000 series will be used for the new architecture while the RX 8000 series is being dedicated to RDNA 3.5 mobile.
Say Hello to the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070
Today's RDNA 4 announcement mirrors AMD's decision to take a step back in the flagship GPU race. As such, the only GPUs from Team Red's stable are the Radeon RX 9070 XT and the Radeon RX 9070.
These GPUs will be available in Q1 2025 from AMD's add-in board (AiB) partners, which now includes Acer that also makes Intel's Arc lineup of dGPUs.
Source(s)
AMD CES 2025 press brief