New Radeon RX 9000 GPUs promise to fix two of AMD’s biggest weaknesses

Nvidia is expected to announce the specs, pricing and availability of the first few cards of the new RTX 50 series at its CES keynote later today. AMD isn’t ready to go into detail about its next-generation GPU lineup just yet, but today the company shared some details about its next-generation RDNA 4 graphics architecture and 9000 series graphics cards.

AMD has mentioned that RDNA 4 cards should be released in early 2025. recent earnings callacknowledging that shipments of current generation RX 7000 series cards are already slowing. CEO Lisa Su said at the time that the architecture would include “significantly higher ray tracing performance” as well as “new artificial intelligence capabilities.”

The preview the company is providing today provides few details beyond these superficial statements. Compute units will be “optimized”, AI calculations will be “improved”, ray tracing will be “improved”, and media encoding quality will be “better”, but AMD is not providing exact numbers at this time. RDNA 4 will launch with the Radeon RX 9070 XT and 9070 sometime in the first quarter of 2025, with more information coming from AMD “later in the quarter.”

The GPUs will be built on a 4nm process, presumably from TSMC, an upgrade from the 5nm process used for 7000 series GPUs and the 6nm process used for select memory controller chipsets (AMD has not said whether RDNA 4V GPUs use chiplets; in the 7000 series they were used for high-end GPUs, not low-end ones).

We know that AMD’s next-gen upscaling algorithm, FidelityFX Super Resolution 4, was “designed for AMD RDNA 4” and it will be the first version of FSR to use machine learning-based upscaling. Nvidia’s DLSS and Intel’s XeSS (when running on Intel GPUs) also use ML-based scaling, which typically results in better results, but also has more stringent hardware requirements than older versions of FSR. AMD hasn’t said whether FSR 4 will work on older Radeon cards.