AMD reveals RDNA4 architecture, Radeon RX 9070 GPUs, and Ryzen 9000 X3D CPUs

What simply occurred? The massive shock out of CES 2025 is that AMD hasn’t totally launched new RDNA4 GPUs on the present, as a substitute deciding to merely “preview” the brand new structure and a few graphics card fashions. As of writing, AMD has formally introduced the RDNA4 graphics structure, Radeon RX 9070 sequence of GPUs, ML-powered FSR 4 upscaling, and new Ryzen 9000 X3D desktop CPUs. We have got all the data for you right here, plus just a few ideas on what AMD has proven off to this point.

AMD has introduced new Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 graphics playing cards, however has completed so with out offering any specs, any efficiency figures, pricing, or a launch date, exterior of a obscure “Q1 2025.” This can be a fairly disappointing provided that many had been anticipating full product particulars from AMD’s RDNA4 launch – you will simply should hold ready to be taught every thing about these fashions.

It actually looks like AMD just isn’t prepared to decide to offering concrete data forward of Nvidia’s GeForce 50 sequence announcement, which we’re anticipating later right now as effectively. This provides AMD extra flexibility to reply to Nvidia’s new technology, for higher or worse. In the event that they actually wish to disappoint players this technology and guarantee RDNA4 is a flop, they might look ahead to RTX 50 sequence pricing and make their equal fashions barely cheaper – a technique that categorically did not work with the earlier technology and completely shouldn’t be tried once more. However who is aware of, we may be in for a repeat anyway.

A extra optimistic perspective is that AMD may be ready to see what Nvidia does to make sure their merchandise are extremely aggressive and to higher market their playing cards compared to Nvidia. If Nvidia decides to provide us an honest price-to-performance enchancment this technology, then AMD may reply with much more aggressive pricing later or make minor configuration changes. Realistically, crucial issue for AMD is how good RDNA4 seems to be compared to Nvidia’s new merchandise.

New Radeon RX 9070 GPUs

AMD is saying the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070, which can be accessible in Q1 2025 from a spread of companions, together with the standard manufacturers like Asus, Gigabyte, Sapphire, and PowerColor. MSI is not going to be producing RDNA4 merchandise, having exited that market in the course of the RDNA3 technology, although they have not offered an official motive as to why. Our understanding is that there is some form of relationship subject in the intervening time between AMD and MSI.

You may see quite a lot of associate fashions within the picture on the high of this story, however AMD additionally appears to have snuck in a brand new reference mannequin into the image, in each a three- and two-fan design. This reference design was beforehand revealed by an AMD advert just a few weeks in the past.

As for the RDNA4 structure, AMD has made just some gentle disclosures at CES. RDNA4 can be constructed on the identical household of TSMC nodes as RDNA3 – on this case for RDNA4, a 4nm node, whereas for RDNA3 the compute die was constructed on N5. The expectation is that RDNA4 makes use of a special design to RDNA3, now not separating the GPU cores and reminiscence controller into separate dies on separate nodes, however there’s been no affirmation of precisely what this seems to be like.

AMD is touting a variety of architectural enhancements with RDNA4. The headlining function is an “optimized” compute unit, AMD advised us in a briefing that this features a “important” change to the structure, larger IPC, and elevated frequency – which feels like a bit greater than a mere optimization. This means that RDNA4 ought to see a notable efficiency enchancment from the same variety of compute items to RDNA3 – RDNA3 fashions usually clocked between 2.1 and a couple of.3 GHz for his or her recreation clock, so pushing that up together with higher IPC ought to result in a wholesome efficiency achieve.

As well as, RDNA4 includes a “large” change to the AI elements of the structure, and whereas AMD stored this obscure, they did say they’ve added numerous capabilities to the design. The ray tracing engine has been overhauled for improved efficiency, however now we have no numbers to again this up but. There’s additionally a second-gen “Radiance Show Engine,” suggesting additional enhancements to show connectivity relative to RDNA3.

The media encoder is “considerably” higher in keeping with AMD, and so they really offered some specifics to again up this declare. A footnote reveals that is evaluating H.264 picture high quality utilizing VMAF high quality scores between RDNA3 and RDNA4 in three video games (Borderlands 3, Far Cry 6, and Watch Canine Legion) at 1080p and 4K. H.264 was an enormous weak level for AMD’s media encoder, so it is encouraging to see these claims focusing on enchancment in that space given H.264 remains to be extensively used. Hopefully, there aren’t any {hardware} bugs with the encoder this time, like outputting AV1 at 1082p as a substitute of 1080p, an actual subject with RDNA3.

AMD has not offered concrete efficiency figures for RDNA4 simply but, nevertheless they shared a teaser on this slide speaking about Radeon branding. At nighttime grey, now we have present generations just like the GeForce 40 sequence and RX 7000 sequence, and a dashed line indicating the place AMD believes the RTX 5000 sequence will fall – a bit quicker than present fashions. Then on the appropriate, now we have the positioning for each the RX 9070 and RX 9060 sequence, and sure, there is a point out right here of the 9060 with no additional data.

The place the RX 9070 sequence matches up with present playing cards is across the stage of the RTX 4070 Ti and RX 7900 XT for the highest-tier 9070 mannequin, which has lengthy been rumored because the efficiency ceiling for RDNA4.

AMD is suggesting the decrease RX 9070 mannequin could possibly be within the vary of the RX 7800 XT, after which we’ll see the RX 9060 sequence providing efficiency at finest between the 7700 XT and 7800 XT, and for the lowest-tier playing cards, across the 7600 XT.

AMD says this new naming scheme was chosen for 2 causes. Firstly, to match their direct competitor, primarily copying Nvidia to make it simpler for individuals to determine how AMD playing cards evaluate…

AMD says this new naming scheme was chosen for 2 causes. First, to match their direct competitor, primarily copying Nvidia to make it simpler for individuals to determine how AMD playing cards evaluate. Mainly, they’re saying the RX 9070 sequence is a competitor to the RTX 5070 sequence, although whether or not which means for each efficiency and pricing stays to be seen. Secondly, they mentioned the 9000 sequence title was chosen to align with their CPU sequence and in addition as a result of 8000 sequence GPU branding is getting used for cell designs with RDNA3.5.

The title would not actually matter an excessive amount of, to be sincere. What issues is whether or not AMD can ship a robust GPU with aggressive options and nice worth. Renaming their lineup so it seems to be extra like an Nvidia card is not the important thing to extra gross sales. The bottom line is making a product just like regardless of the RTX 5070 finally ends up being, justifying the matched title, after which smashing Nvidia down with higher pricing and worth.

FSR 4 = Machine-learning-based upscaling

AMD additionally introduced a few new options coming with RDNA4 GPUs. There’s “Adrenalin AI”, okay… Then the a lot greater and extra essential function for players, FSR 4, which is lastly shifting to machine-learning-based upscaling. There’s not a lot element being offered right here both (see the sample?), exterior of FSR 4 being developed for RDNA4, and designed for high-quality 4K upscaling.

The hope is that FSR 4’s high quality will enhance to the purpose of being actually aggressive with DLSS, which is extra prone to occur with an AI-enhanced algorithm like Nvidia already makes use of and like Intel makes use of with XeSS. However we’ve not been offered any demonstration of FSR 4, and we do not know when it’ll launch.

There are just a few further tidbits although. FSR 4 is designed to make use of the AI accelerators constructed into RDNA4, however AMD hasn’t confirmed whether or not FSR 4 is unique to RDNA4 graphics playing cards or whether or not it will likely be broadly accessible like FSR 3, which works not solely on older AMD GPUs but in addition with chips from Nvidia and Intel.

AMD says FSR 4 will present not simply a picture high quality enchancment in comparison with FSR 3, however a efficiency enchancment as effectively, which is fascinating.

We additionally noticed a somewhat fascinating footnote, which reads: AMD FSR 4 improve function solely accessible on AMD Radeon RX 9070 sequence graphics for supported video games with AMD FSR 3.1 already built-in. This means that AMD has developed some form of conversion system that may take a recreation with FSR 3.1 and routinely improve it to FSR 4 when you have got an RX 9070 graphics card.

We requested AMD about this unusual footnote that does not appear associated to any of the details on the slide, and so they declined to elaborate or clarify this, which is a bit uncommon. If this function does exist in the best way the footnote appears to counsel, it could be a really strong method to launch FSR 4, provided that FSR 3.1 is already accessible in round 50 video games.

Recreation help is essential as a result of FSR 4 wouldn’t improve the worth of RDNA4 if it took two to 3 years for it to be supported in a large variety of video games. In that form of state of affairs, DLSS would nonetheless have an enormous benefit in recreation help, and thus would nonetheless be value paying for. But when FSR 4 can launch with respectable recreation help proper off the bat, it’ll go an extended method to closing that hole, offered picture high quality and efficiency additionally maintain up.

Varied board companions can be displaying off Radeon RX 9070 fashions at CES 2025, so we’ll hopefully get some hands-on time with them within the coming few days proper right here in Las Vegas.

New Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D CPUs

AMD additionally introduced two further desktop Ryzen 9000 CPUs: the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D. These are precisely as anticipated, bringing 2nd-gen 3D V-Cache know-how to 16- and 12-core CPUs, offering a single CPU with nice efficiency for players and creators.

In the event you needed to guess what the specs of those CPUs appeared like, you’d most likely be proper.

The Ryzen 9 9950X3D with 16 cores packs 128MB of whole L3 cache, 64MB from the unique Zen 5 CCDs, and 64MB stacked beneath one of many CCDs – the opposite CCD stays with out V-cache, in the same design to the 7950X3D. Scheduling remains to be required to make sure video games run on the 8-core CCD with V-cache, whereas the opposite CCD is designed to run on the highest attainable frequencies – on this case, 5.7 GHz, the identical max clock velocity because the 7950X3D.

The TDP can also be equivalent to the 7950X3D at 170W, so that is mainly a straight Zen 4 to Zen 5 core structure improve.

The 9900X3D, the 12-core mannequin, can also be what you’d anticipate: 128MB of L3 cache and as much as a 5.5 GHz max increase frequency, 100 MHz decrease than the 7900X3D. The TDP stays the identical at 120W. No pricing was given for both of those CPUs, and AMD has solely mentioned they are going to be accessible in Q1 of 2025.

As for efficiency, AMD claims in their very own benchmarks that the 9950X3D will ship efficiency roughly equal to the 9800X3D in video games, inside 1%. This implies an 8% enchancment in comparison with the 7950X3D in AMD’s testing throughout 40 titles at 1080p excessive settings – which, once more, AMD says is just like how the 9800X3D in comparison with the 7800X3D. Relative to the 285K, AMD believes the 9950X3D must be 20% quicker in video games.

In productiveness apps and creator workloads, AMD is quoting a 13% enhance in efficiency relative to the 7950X3D throughout 20 apps and a ten% enhance relative to the Core Extremely 9 285K. Because of this AMD believes the 9950X3D would be the better part for each players and creators, because it affords each higher gaming and higher productiveness efficiency than the 285K of their testing. After all, we’ll should confirm whether or not that is true in our full overview when the components launch, so keep tuned for that.

Different AMD bulletins at CES 2025 relate to cell components, which we’ll be masking shortly, together with new laptop computer {hardware} and chips for gaming handhelds. There are tons of mentions of AI, too, due to course, that is the pattern. A few of the laptop computer CPUs even have AI within the title, just like the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Professional 395, which is an actual title for an actual product.

That was extra of a teaser from AMD than a full product launch, however all of those new merchandise should not too distant. We should always be taught extra about RDNA4 particularly shortly. Keep tuned for extra CES 2025 protection right here on TechSpot.