Sony PlayStation lead system architect Mark Cerny has done an in-depth interview with Digital Foundry. The full discussion isn't out yet, but a few very interesting tidbits have been released regarding Sony's latest PSSR upscaling technology for the PlayStation 5 Pro, the related Project Amethyst collaboration with AMD, and how that all ties in with FSR upscaling on the PC.

Indeed, one of the pressing unknowns that Digital Foundry wanted to clear up was the relationship between Sony's newly upgraded PSSR upscaling and FSR Redstone, the latter being the latest machine learning-based build of AMD's upscaling tech for the PC.

"Just to clarify a few things about the collaboration with AMD, the new PSSR uses the same core co-developed algorithm as FSR Redstone's upscaling," Cerny told Digital Foundry. Cery also said that the PlayStation platform could consequently get frame generation in future.

"FSR Frame Generation is also based on co-developed technology (or as my good friend Jack Huynh puts it, 'co-engineered technology'). I’m very happy with how that work is progressing, and an equivalent frame generation library should be seen at some point on PlayStation platforms," he said.

But for the PC, the interesting bit is how the PS5 Pro handles AI-based upscaling. "FSR Redstone and the new PSSR have somewhat different implementations due to the underlying hardware, e.g. FSR Upscaling uses 8-bit floating point, and PSSR uses 8-bit integer," Cerny clarifies.

"The MAC counts (i.e. the amount of math involved) also vary a bit, and training data is similar but not exactly the same. None of the above factors seem to make too much difference in results; as both SIE and AMD have just released their refreshed models, it will be an excellent test of how closely we can match our systems."

The context here, of course, is that the PS5 Pro uses AMD graphics hardware. Typically, it's described as being a hybrid between RDNA 2 and RDNA 3, but with some RDNA 4-derived ray-tracing capabilities and some additional custom machine-learning capabilities on top.

But as Cerny himself emphasises, when it comes to upscaling and particularly running ML-based upscaling, the PS5 Pro has a different matrix math implementation to RDNA 4, hence the need to run INT8 as opposed to FP8 for PSSR 2.

Of course, anyone who has been following the whole FSR 4 / FSR Redstone saga closely will recall that AMD leaked an unofficial version of FSR 4, which included an INT8 codepath. That has allowed a community effort to provide support for FSR 4 for older RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 AMD graphics cards via the Optiscaler tool, the latest version of which now supports RDNA 2 without the need to run ancient drivers.

Immediately, that begs the question of the relationship between Sony's INT8 PSSR 2 and the unofficial INT8 version of FSR 4 that leaked out and can be run on older AMD PC graphics cards.

Now, one assumption that's tempting to make is that whatever Sony and AMD have cooked up to run on the PS5 Pro would be a good candidate for an INT8 ML-based upscaler for older AMD PC. GPUs. Heck, maybe that leaked INT8 version of FSR 4 only exists because Sony and AMD have been working on INT8 ML upscaling for the PlayStation?

Sadly, none of that may really follow. As Nick explained back when the PS5 Pro's technical details leaked, it has some significantly upgraded INT8 hardware support compared to older RDNA generations. That means the PS5 Pro is rated at 300 TOPS for INT8 performance compared to a mere 75 TOPS for the Radeon RX 7800 XT. Even the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is only rated at 123 TOPS by AMD.

Long story short, there's a huge gulf in INT8 performance between the PS5 Pro and pre-RDNA 4 AMD PC GPU generations. So, it does not seem at all safe to assume that anything Sony and AMD cook up to run on the PS5 Pro in terms of upscaling is a good candidate for those older PC graphics cards, sadly.

That's a pity, because Digital Foundry has also done a detailed analysis of the latest upgraded version of PSSR with machine learning and found it to be dramatically improved from the original PSSR, the latter not using any machine-learning technology and being based on spatial and temporal algorithms.

Still, hope remains that AMD might eventually deliver an official release of some version of FSR 4 or FSR Redstone for owners of older RDNA GPUs. Optiscaler shows it can work pretty well, and with all the billions AMD is making from its server CPUs and AI chips right now, it doesn't seem like a huge ask.

Microsoft is reportedly aiming for a 2027 launch for its next-gen Xbox, with AMD once again producing a semi-custom chip to power it.

In AMD's earnings call, CEO Dr. Lisa Su told analysts and investors that it is already well into development of the future Xbox console's SoC, noting the launch window in no uncertain terms.

"Development of Microsoft's next-gen Xbox featuring an AMD semi-custom SoC is progressing well to support a launch in 2027," (transcript, The Motley Fool).

AMD has been Microsoft's partner of choice for developing its Xbox hardware. The company's semi-custom unit has been responsible for every Xbox console since the Xbox One, including the recently released Xbox Ally X and Xbox Ally, if we're counting those re-badged handheld PCs as an Xbox—though I don't.

Microsoft president Sarah Bond had previously confirmed that the next-gen Xbox would be targeting the high-end market. In an interview with Mashable, Bond said it would be a "very premium, very high-end, curated experience."

That suggests that AMD will be bringing a powerful chip to the fore for the console. As we tend to see with console launches, they are announced with as yet unreleased hardware, but by the time they are released, PC hardware has caught up or isn't far off.

We know that AMD plans to release its next-gen Ryzen processors, using the Zen 6 architecture, later this year. That will be followed by Zen 7, which is confirmed but does not yet have a release window. It seems likely that Zen 7 will land just in time for Microsoft's suggested launch.

In terms of graphics, we're not expecting much movement in terms of a new GPU generation from AMD this year, with RDNA 5 potentially landing in 2027. So that appears likely to make its way into both the next-gen Xbox and next-gen PlayStation. Sony has been heavily involved in the development of semi-custom processors used in its consoles in the past—the Navi architecture, which later became RDNA, was reportedly heavily influenced by Sony—and the two companies have already outlined their plans for the PlayStation 6.

Both Sony and Xbox use the same Zen 2/RDNA 2 architectures in their existing console lineup.

The big question will be whether these release windows shift, as the memory crisis continues or, let's hope not, deepens. Both Xbox and PlayStation increased the price of their existing consoles at the tail-end of 2025, and before we really saw prices skyrocket for memory. There is hope that some new capacity and newly-struck deals may alleviate some of the short supply seeing prices soar, however, AI appears top of the food chain, and may gobble up all it can get.

Last week, Microsoft announced its financial report for the most recent quarter, and noted that, despite bumper revenues, Xbox hardware revenues are down by 32%. Xbox content and services are also down 5%, attributing to an overall gaming revenue plummet of 9%. A drop in sales towards the end of a console's lifespan is to be expected, though at this rate, Xbox might have a shaky year ahead before the hot new thing arrives in 2027.

Dr. Lisa Su also confirmed that it would expect its semi-custom revenue to increase once the ramp up for the Xbox (and PlayStation, as noted previously) occurs. Answering a question from an analyst on whether semi-custom will decline through 2026 as the console generation wanes, Su said:

"But as we ramp the new generation you would expect a reversal of that."

Though AMD does cite "improved semi-custom sales" for 2025 in its most recent earnings call. It does pump out a lot of what it considers semi-custom chips for handhelds right now, powering most of the popular options, including the Steam Deck. Speaking of which, AMD is also making a semi-custom GPU for the Steam Machine, which Su says is on track for early 2026.

In other news from AMD's earnings, the company is up 34% year-over-year in total revenue, earning $34.6 billion—a record, apparently. Client and gaming, all the bits we care about as gamers, earned $3.9 billion for the most recent quarter, up 37%. That's mostly down to Ryzen, though for the entire year AMD cites improved Radeon demand from its popular RX 9000-series cards for its helping hand.

It's been almost seven months since it was first announced, but at long last, AMD's much-vaunted machine learning-powered update to FSR is finally here. With the AMD Adrenalin 25.12.1 driver releasing today, you too can get on the new FSR bandwagon. So long as you have an RDNA 4 card, that is. Better known as FSR 'Redstone', the work done here essentially brings AMD on par with Nvidia and Intel, in terms of applying AI to upscaling, frame generation, and other rendering technologies.

However, it's worth pointing out now that AMD still doesn't have multi-frame generation, so it's not quite at the same level. It's also a little too early to tell whether the new FSR frame generation is as good as DLSS MFG or XeSS-MFG in terms of image quality, and that's because it only works on a relatively small number of games.

Something else that I need to get out of the way is AMD's bizarre decision to drop any numbering with FSR. For example, FSR 4 was announced in February and brought AI-powered upscaling to games on RDNA 4 graphics cards.

That's now simply called AMD FSR Upscaling. But that's also the same name for FSR 3's upscaler. And FSR 2. But they don't use machine learning, so to help differentiate between them all, AMD's more expansive terminologies are AMD FSR Upscaling (Analytical) and AMD FSR Upscaling (ML).

It's the same thing with FSR 3 Frame Generation: that's now called AMD FSR Frame Generation (Analytical), with the new one in Redstone sporting the same label with ML in parentheses. I'll come back to this later, as it's something that's bugging me a touch (just a touch? -Ed.).

FSR Frame Generation

FSR Redstone introduces three items, though one has already been released (FSR Ray Regeneration), and of the two remaining, FSR Frame Generation and FSR Radiance Cache, the latter isn't available to preview and won't appear in games until next year anyway. So that means the entirety of my FSR Redstone testing consists of the new frame gen system.

Good job it's bang on the money, then. For the same reasons that FSR 4 upscaling is so much better than FSR 3, the use of AI to calculate the colours for the generated frame means that you can pretty much wave goodbye to almost all of the weird artefacts that you get with FSR 3 frame gen.

As I've already mentioned, FSR Frame Generation (the ML one) only works on a few games at the moment—31 to be precise. I've picked out some of them for you to see, first testing them using FSR 3 upscaling and frame gen, then once more, but with Redstone in full action.

The test PC comprised a Ryzen 9 9900X in an MSI MEG X870 Godlike, with 32 GB of DDR5-6000 CL32, and an Asus Prime Radeon RX 9070 XT. For some of the games, I used their built-in benchmarks, so that you can directly compare the visuals/performance to your own system.

To get a game to use Redstone (i.e. FSR 4 upscaling and the new AI frame gen), you first enable FSR 3 or FSR 3.1 in the game, then exit. Then, in Adrenalin Software, you activate the relevant toggles for the specific game, which forces the drivers to override which FSR gets used.

Until developers are directly implementing Redstone (FSR, if you prefer AMD's name for it all now), this is the only way to do it. Some games already automatically convert the name for FSR 3/3.1 upscaling to FSR 4 (e.g. Cyberpunk 2077), but it will probably be a good while before any consistent naming is used in games.

Black Myth: Wukong

I ran Black Myth: Wukong at 4K, using the Cinematic graphics preset, but without Full Ray Tracing enabled. For both captures, Performance upscaling (i.e. 50%) was used, along with frame generation. I also completely forgot to move the darn cursor out of the way, both times, and only noticed it far too late. Err, sorry about that...

Admittedly, seeing only half the frame isn't the best way to judge it all, but there's enough visible to spot that FSR Redstone is notably better than FSR 3. Most of the quality gains are down to FSR 4—sorry, FSR Upscaling (ML)—which retains almost all native texture details and doesn't blur objects such as falling leaves.

Frame gen is pretty well implemented in this game, so it's very hard to spot where the new version works better, even in the full videos. You notice it more during gameplay, when you're spinning the camera around very quickly: with FSR 3 frame gen, it can blur and 'pull' objects in view, but not with the AI system.

Best of all, there is no performance difference in using Redstone frame gen compared to FSR 3. There is a performance hit to using FSR 4 (for the sake of simplicity, I'm just going to keep calling FSR Upscaling (ML) this instead of its new name), but it's pretty minor, all things considered.

Cyberpunk 2077

It's a similar story with Cyberpunk 2077, tested at 4K again, using the RT Ultra graphics preset. There's a slightly larger performance hit using Redstone than in Black Myth: Wukong, but again, it's not big enough to be worried about, and it's the upscaler that's doing this, not the frame generator.

It's a little hard to see in the above video, but AMD's machine learning systems do a better job of retaining dust, fog, and smoke detail than standard FSR 3. But, just as with Wukong, the older tech has been well implemented in the game, so the fixes were only going to be minor for the most part.

Redstone's frame gen is pretty happy with rapid camera changes and thin objects in the distance, such as power lines, but I did spot the odd shimmering on some surfaces during gameplay. I tried my best to capture them, but they just disappear in video compression.

F1 25

If there's one game that desperately needs some AI loving, it's F1 25. Just watch the first 30 or so seconds of the above video to see what I mean. FSR 3 frame gen absolutely butchers the shadows of the cars, especially the player's.

Not so with Redstone. It generates those almost perfectly, though not always, and you can still see some glitches with cars in the distance. However, some of that is still present without frame gen, so it's probably down to the engine using low-resolution shadows for cars once they're a certain distance away from the camera.

Once again, all of this is achieved with only a very small performance hit compared to FSR 3. Without the use of upscaling, at 4K Ultra High, F1 25 runs at around 40 frames per second, with 1% lows of 29 fps. If you have an RDNA 4 card, jump into Adrenalin Software, hit the toggles, and then fire up the game. Once in, activate FSR 3 upscaling and frame gen, and the software will override it all and use the good stuff.

Grand Theft Auto 5: Enhanced

For a final quick test of FSR Redstone's frame generator, I picked GTA 5: Enhanced out of the list of 31 games. Small correction: I picked Mafia: The Old Country first, but that game's settings menu was just completely blank for me, no matter what I tried.

Testing GTA 5 is fiddly at the best of times, because when you restart the whole game (which you have to, in order to enable Redstone), you never begin at the exact point where you last saved. So please forgive the fact that the above videos don't synchronise whatsoever, and try to just focus on how well FSR 3 handles things compared to the AI stuff.

I think it's fair to say that there isn't a whole heap of difference when it comes to visual quality. Redstone does a slightly better job of keeping power lines solid and stopping foliage from blurring as it rapidly passes by, but it's not exactly a stark contrast.

Tested once more at 4K with the High RT graphics preset, GTA 5 shows the biggest performance drop out of all the games I tested: around 30 fps from the average frame rate, and 25 fps from the 1% lows. The ray tracing in this game can be brutal on a GPU, especially when cranked right up, so I suspect there's just a little bit too much going on for the RDNA 4 card, when it's having to juggle lots of ray and AI upscaling.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7

While Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is one of the few games that will happily switch over to the AI frame gen, I instead focused on something else out of Redstone: FSR Ray Regeneration. This is AMD's answer to Nvidia's DLSS Ray Reconstruction and essentially does a better job of denoising and reconstructing images off reflected surfaces.

Black Ops: 7 is the only game that supports right now, and I have to say that it's an odd choice to showcase the tech. I mean, who's going to take time to check out the accuracy of a reflection in a shiny floor in the middle of a raging battle?

Anyway, the above video is a comparison of 'straight' Redstone (i.e. FSR 4 + AI frame gen) and Redstone with Ray Reconstruction enabled. If you look hard enough, you can certainly see where the AI denoiser is actually improving things. Interestingly, you can also see where the frame gen is borking stuff, too, though not very easily.

For a handful of frames, between 19 and 20 seconds in the video, the straight Redstone run generates some odd-looking steps coming out of the pool. You can only spot by inching through, frame at a time, so you'd never spot it during actual gameplay. It just shows that, as good as Redstone is, like all frame generators, it's not perfect.

FSR Ray Regeneration doesn't seem to generate much of a performance impact in Black Ops 7, or at least not in the game's benchmark. We'll obviously need to see it in use a lot more before we can make any overall judgement about it.

The missing piece: FSR Radiance Cache

The final part of FSR Redstone to discuss is a bit of an odd one. That's because it's not something that PC gamers will ever be able to use themselves directly, as it has to be used by developers within the engine. This is also true of any part of FSR (you can't force it to magically work in a game that doesn't have it implemented), but there is still some degree of user interactivity with those.

AMD's Josh Hort, Senior Director and Head of ISV Enabling, described the process behind FSR Radiance Cache: "We sample the scene, the camera viewport and geometry are used to generate accurate radiance values, which are then fed to a neural network for training. We train the network to understand how radiance behaves in the scene, how light interacts with surfaces, how indirect lighting propagates, and so on.

"During runtime, the FSR radiance caching phase, we use the train network to provide radiance results early, as soon as the second ray intersection. That means we can get high-quality lighting much faster with fewer rays and less brute force computation, which directly translates into performance."

What's not super clear at this stage is what Hort means by 'we': Is the training stage done entirely by AMD, or does this have to be done by the developer? An updated FSR SDK with a preview of FSR Radiance Cache should be available on GPUopen by the time this article goes live, so I'll hopefully be able to check then.

AMD showed a very short clip of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide running with FSR Radiance Cache, and while it looked very pretty, the total lack of any performance metrics made it useless, because improving the speed of ray tracing is what this aspect of Redstone is all about.

My issues with FSR Redstone

Let me be clear on one thing here: Whatever you want to call it, FSR Redstone is a success. The AI upscaler is very good; the AI frame generator is perhaps even better. A single use case sample of the AI denoiser isn't enough to judge whether it's something you'd always want to enable, but it seems good, too.

But that doesn't mean AMD is getting off the hook, here. For starters, it's late, very late, to market. Nvidia introduced AI-powered frame generation back in September 2022, and Intel followed suit in December 2024, and both have released updated versions since.

Meanwhile, AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs have been around since March of this year, and while they got FSR 4 very quickly, it shouldn't have taken this long to get FSR Frame Generation out of the door. Why FSR Ray Regeneration got a priority release is puzzling. I suspect that AMD originally planned for FSR 4 to be the full Redstone package, but development woes and delays just pushed it further and further back.

Another gripe I have with FSR Redstone is the whole naming thing. I don't think the full names are expected to be used in games, just FSR Upscaling, etc, and while I appreciate the move to simplify the whole nomenclature, AMD could have simply called Redstone, FSR 5 or even just 4.5, or anything with a number.

The number is important because when they inevitably get updated, how are gamers and developers supposed to tell the difference between the versions? There will be version codes used by AMD's FSR developers, so why bury them under marketing fluff?

Lastly, I'm not super happy about the fact that to use the main features of the new FSR, it all has to be done via the Adrenalin Software tool. That's already the case with FSR 4, but now you have to do the same with the ML version of frame generation. I admit it's not really a big deal, because if you have an RDNA 4 graphics card, you really want to use Redstone all the time, but for newcomers to PC gaming, the interface is pretty messy.

The engineers behind AMD's GPUs and software are bona fide magicians, and both RDNA 4 and FSR are the real deal. It's just a shame that the company can't or won't get a better handle on its marketing division.

Update, November 3, 2025: AMD has posted a blog entitled "Continued Support for Ever Radeon Gamer", where it clarifies that RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 GPUs will not be losing game-specific optimisations as they enter 'maintenance mode'.

Previously, AMD said, "Future driver updates with targeted game optimisations will focus on RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs," and focus appears to be the operative word here.

Effectively, AMD is instead splitting the code paths, with RDNA 3 and 4 getting new features faster and RDNA 1 and 2 continuing to receive stability and optimisation updates.

Original article: AMD has earned quite a bit of goodwill this year with the popular launches of the rather great RX 9070 XT and RX 9060 XT. AMD's wins were Nvidia's losses in consumer goodwill with the RTX 5070, in particular, having a pretty weak showing in our tests. As is ever the case, that pendulum has swung once more, with outrage in response to AMD moving RDNA 1 and 2 cards to legacy support.

The original AMD Adrenaline notice states, "New Game Support and Expanded Vulkan Extensions Support is available to Radeon RX 7000 and 9000 series graphics products." When quizzed on this by PC Games Hardware (machine translated), AMD said:

"RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 graphics cards will continue to receive driver updates for critical security and bug fixes. To focus on optimising and delivering new and improved technologies for the latest GPUs, AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 is placing Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series graphics cards (RDNA 1 and RDNA 2) into maintenance mode. Future driver updates with targeted game optimisations will focus on RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs."

The first RDNA cards popped up in 2019, with RX 6000 series GPUs featuring RDNA 2 architecture. RX 6000 GPUs launched in 2020, and could still be bought new this year, so this seems like a particularly short shelf life for cards to lose game-specific optimisations, especially considering Nvidia's ongoing support for older cards.

The Sony PS5 is RDNA 2-based, as is the ROG Xbox Ally, which launched this month. The ROG Xbox Ally X has avoided this fate, thanks to the swanky Z2 Extreme chip and its RDNA 3.5-powered iGPU. No word has been stated on gaming handheld support thus far, but game-specific optimisations are important there.

As they are working off more limited hardware than a PC, handhelds perform as they do, in part, due to specific optimisations made. Losing that support could mean they age quicker going forward.

Potential buyers have taken to Reddit to vent their frustrations with this change. A thread helpfully titled "AMD what the f**k u are doing?" has seen 600 comments in just under a day, with many expressing confusion with RDNA 2, specifically, losing support. "I can maybe understand not focusing on the RDNA 1, but the 6000 series? The 6700XT, 6800XT, and 6900XT are still super relevant GPUs."

RDNA 2 cards are still performing well to this day, and make for a solid build, especially if you can buy them second-hand or at a lower price. Without further support, RDNA 2 cards are a worse investment in a rig from here on out. This is especially weird when the likes of the GRE version of the Radeon RX 6750 launched less than two years ago, and we saw RX 6750 XTs and 6950 XTs launching just three years ago.

Nvidia's RTX 20-series cards (which launched at a similar time to RDNA 1) are still receiving game-ready drivers from the Nvidia app, and it was only announced early this year that Nvidia would be winding down developer support for 9 and 10 series cards. AMD GPUs may be known for ageing like fine wine, but for game-specific support, RDNA 1 and 2 could be set to age like that bag of spinach in the back of your fridge.

In an interview with Japanese outlet 4Gamer, AMD has revealed that the upcoming Redstone update for its FSR upscaling platform can run on not just AMD GPUs but graphics cards from other vendors. Yup, that's right, that includes Nvidia GPUs.

Chris Hall, Senior Director Software Development and head of AMD's ROCm project, which is a software stack for AI development and roughly equivalent to Nvidia's CUDA platform, explained that FSR Redstone—which could be called FSR 5 when it hopefully releases later this year—was developed using code from a ROCm project known as AMD ML2CODE (Machine Learning to Code).

Apparently, FSR Redstone's neural rendering technology is "converted" into compute Shader code. "This means that FSR Redstone's neural rendering core can also run on GPUs made by other companies," Hall said (via machine translation).

In other words, it doesn't require AI or matrix math cores, just as Nvidia's DLSS technology requires Tensor cores. It can run on conventional GPU shaders. "ML2CODE-based frameworks, such as FSR Redstone, can be seamlessly integrated directly into DirectX or Vulkan graphics pipelines with minimal latency. We believe that the ML2CODE solution is the best way, at least for now, to integrate and deploy 3D graphics and AI technologies." Hall says.

That's a pretty explicit indication that AMD favours running AI-enhanced upscaling on the shader pipeline as opposed to fitting out GPUs with dedicated AI cores, the latter being Nvidia's approach over multiple generations of RTX GPUs and their Tensor cores.

However, Hall does foresee future AMD graphics architectures that will have dedicated AI cores that are compatible with Microsoft's DirectX Cooperative Vector technology. "Cooperative Vector is a DirectX programming model. It's a framework that provides a way for programmable shader units to perform calculations using other accelerators. In other words, it's a framework that allows shader programs to utilize AI accelerators within the GPU. This is an excellent approach for implementing various AI styles.

"However, currently, significant delays can occur unless the GPU has an architecture specialized for Cooperative Vector technology. It's true that we're actively working on supporting Cooperative Vector," Hall says.

All of this scans perfectly in the context of AMD's existing GPU technology. Even AMD's very latest RDNA 4 GPUs, such as the Radeon RX 9070 XT, don't have dedicated hardware AI cores equivalent to Nvidia's Tensor cores. Instead, RDNA 4 has optimisations to the shader engines to improve matrix math performance. AMD describes this capability in the shader engine as an "AI accelerator," but it's not entirely clear whether that constitutes discrete hardware you can physically point to in the chip as opposed to add capability in the general purpose shader ALUs.

"ML2CODE-based Compute Shader approach is highly versatile and delivers optimal performance on many current GPUs, including NVIDIA GPUs," Hall says, adding that the two approaches of running ML upscaling code either in the shader pipeline or on dedicated AI cores, "may merge or be integrated in the future. I'm not sure when that will happen, though."

Of course, the obvious caveat here is that "can" is not the same as "will." We can confidently say from Hall's comments that it does not seem like there are any technical reasons why AMD's FSR Redstone couldn't run on Nvidia and indeed Intel GPUs. But we can't say there won't be commercial or political reasons why AMD doesn't make that happen.

For gamers, it's definitely preferable if upscaling and related technologies like frame generation are platform agnostic. That way you could buy an Nvidia or AMD GPU then use the best upscaler available for a given game. What's more, the way that AMD has built FSR Redstone to run on shader cores opens up the possibility that it might be compatible with older AMD GPUs, like the RDNA 3-based RX 7000 series, including the RX 7800 XT.

However, Nvidia's approach currently locks the DLSS platform down to its own GPUs. So, there's no immediate prospect of a fully open approach to upscaling. Indeed, locking its own upscaling down while AMD takes a more open approach seems to hand the advantage to Nvidia. After all, if you want to buy a GPU that supports both of the main GPU vendors' upscaling tech, for the foreseeable future it looks like your only chance will be Nvidia graphics cards.

Rumours involving AMDs next-gen graphics technology—whether you want to go by RDNA 5 or the new UDNA nomenclature—are reaching critical mass. We've already seen claims that AMD is plotting a high-end GPU with an incredible 192 CUs. Now one of the most reliable sources of advanced GPU information in the business has released a new leak that cuts the compute unit count in half to just 96 for the top RDNA 5 model.

Oh, and it looks like low-end RDNA 5 GPUs might use laptop memory. So, what's going on?

Earlier leaks from YouTube channel Moore's Law is Dead posited a four-chip lineup for AMD's RDNA 5 graphics family, codenamed AT0, AT2, AT3 and AT4. Respectively, those chips were said to have a maximum of 192, 80, 48 and 24 compute units or CUs.

However, Kepler_L2 has posted a quartet of block diagrams for the new GPUs showing CU counts of half of those figures, therefore 96, 40, 24 and 12 CUs, respectively. At first glance, that doesn't seem to make sense.

For starters, the CU counts are just very low. AMD's top GPU from the elderly RDNA 3 family, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, had 96 CUs way back in late 2022, for instance. Likewise, AMD's current Radeon RX 9060 XT has 32 CUs. That uses the Navi 44 GPU, which is roughly equivalent to the AT3 GPU from the rumoured RDNA 5 family. Would AMD really drop the CU count from 32 to 24 for the 9060 XT's replacement?

The most likely answer is no and that the two rumour sources don't actually conflict. The narrative here concerns how AMD measures or defines a CU. It's thought that for RDNA a CU is what used to be called a Work Group Processor or WGP. And can you guess how many CUs a WGP contains in previous RDNA architectures?

That's right, two CUs. In other words, AMD may have renamed WGP to CU for RDNA 5 and thus 96 RDNA 5 CUs is equivalent to 192 RDNA 4 and earlier CUs. If that's correct, the top AT0 GPU is indeed a monster and that 9060 XT replacement suddenly has 50% more CUs, effectively, than before.

At this point, it's worth noting that the maximum CU counts may not translate into actual gaming GPUs. MLID's rumour indicated that while AT0 offers 192 CUs (by the old measure), the top gaming GPU for RDNA 5 would be cut down to 154 old-style CUs. But that's still a massive jump on the 64 CUs in the Radeon RX 9070 XT, which is AMD's current fastest RDNA 4 chip.

What's more, RDNA 5 is expected to get a big boost in ray-tracing and path-tracing that goes well beyond the simple CU counts, however you measure them. Exciting.

As if that's not enough, another detail that's emerged concerns the two low-end dies. In Kepler_L2's block diagrams, the AT3 die is actually shown with more memory controllers than AT2.

If that doesn't seem to make much sense, MLID has said that both AT3 and AT4 will actually use LPDDR5X laptop memory instead of GDDR6 or GDDR7 graphics memory. To achieve reasonable bandwidth, however, it's said to use either a 256-bit or 384-bit memory bus.

If each memory controller on Kepler_L2's diagram is indeed 32-bit, then AT3 has a 256-bit bus, which squares with MLID's information. The objection here involves GPU size and particularly chip perimeter size. Memory controllers take up a lot of space and you wouldn't normally thing that a lower-end GPU would be bit enough for a 256-bit bus.

However, that problem can be solved by stacking memory controllers atop one another, an approach AMD indeed takes with its Strix Halo laptop APU, which also has a 256-bit bus using LPDDR5X memory.

In the end, this is all speculation until it's official. But these leaks are beginning to coalesce into a plausible, coherent whole. And we certainly hope they are true. Because they indicate AMD having a full-on crack at a full stack of gaming. GPUs for the next generation.

AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs, including the Radeon RX 9070 XT, have been out since February. But only now has AMD revealed that they are based on a clever modular architecture.

AMD held a deep dive into its RDNA 4 graphics tech at the Hot Chips 2025 conference yesterday. And perhaps the most intriguing new disclosure is RDNA's so-called "modular SoC architecture".

The idea is to allow multiple GPU configurations to be created more cheaply. so, what AMD says it has done with RDNA 4 is to design it in such a way that a base GPU SoC design can easily be scaled up to create a larger GPU.

Specifically, AMD's base SoC design contains two shader engines and four memory controllers, each with L3 cache. That base SoC also has the display engine, power management and other supporting elements.

To that base SoC can be added another two shader engines and quartet of memory controllers and cache, plus the required infinity fabric interconnect. The implication is that the entire design of the base SoC is repeated exactly on both the smaller base GPU SoC and the larger variant with the added shader engines. Thus the supporting elements in the base GPU, such as the display engine and power management are the same across all GPU variants.

This contrasts with typical GPU designs, where the layout and positioning of the various elements will vary from GPU to GPU. Each GPU design is basically bespoke. Should you peer inside, say, an RTX 5080, you won't see a carbon copy of the internals of an RTX 5070 with some bits added on. Each GPU has its own layout.

Anyway, for AMD this means it only has to design that base SoC layout once and in turn that creating the larger GPU variant is limited to adding the additional components, everything else is carried over using exactly the same layout. That speeds up design, validation, reduces the number of steps before the GPU is sent to the fab for manufacture and so on.

In terms of how this applies to AMD's current RDNA 4 GPUs, the Navi 44 GPU in the Radeon RX 9060 XT is essentially the base SoC with two shader engines and four memory controllers, while the Navi 48 GPU in the Radeon 9070 XT is the larger variant with the added shader engines, memory controllers, cache and so on.

The two GPUs still use different silicon. The smaller GPU isn't just the larger GPU with a bit physically sliced off. It's worth noting that would entail throwing away the additional shader engines, cache and memory controllers because they don't have the necessary elements, such as a display engine, required to actually be a functional GPU. But in terms of design and engineering, the modular approach makes the process faster and cheaper.

Given all that, it is slightly ironic that AMD has only produced a relatively narrow range of GPUs for this current RDNA 4 generation. But it's not clear the modular approach of RDNA 4 was ever intended to extend beyond the quad shader engine design of the Navi 48 GPU.

Put it this way, if you look at the size and shape of Navi 48, it's already a distinctly rectangular chip. Adding another two or even four shader engines and associated hardware would result in the very long and thin chip. Whether it's internal or external interconnects, not to mention chip packing, there are probably limits to how far this modular approach can be taken.

As for what this implies about AMD's future GPU designs, it's hard to say. This is all subtly different from the chiplet engineering that AMD has used to such success in its Ryzen CPUs. AMD did actually have a crack at chiplets for RDNA 3 and graphics cards like the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, of course, only to return to monolithic GPUs for RDNA 4.

There are rumours that AMD is planning on a return once again to chiplets for its next-gen graphics, variously referred to as RDNA 5 and UDNA. According to some rumours, AMD has cooked up a new mid-range GPU roughly equivalent to the Navi 48 chip in the RX 9070 XT, codenamed AT2, with 64 compute units.

But the interesting bit is that as many as three AT2 GPUs can allegedly be combined to make AT0, a new high-end monster with up to 192 compute units, though it's claimed the gaming version of this beast will be limited to 154 CUs.

For context, and always bearing in mind that compute units can't be directly compared across generations, Navi 48 has 64 compute units. Of course—and this is where the "modular" disclosure this week may come in—it's possible that RDNA 5 isn't chiplet-based, per se, but that AMD's AT2 GPU is a new base SoC that can be scaled up in design terms to create larger monolithic CPUs, just as Navi 44 is scaled up to Navi 48.

Anyway, this is all speculation for now. But here's hoping AMD revealed the whole "modular SoC architecture" thing yesterday in order to hint at plans for a broader range of GPUs from its next-gen architecture, including a top-end beast to keep whatever Nvidia has planned to replace the RTX 5090 honest.

If your first thought upon considering AMD's existing entry-level RDNA 4-based gaming GPU, the Radeon RX 9060 XT 8 GB, goes something along the lines of less is more, we have good news. AMD has quietly rolled out a new non-XT version with fewer cores, lower clocks and the same measly 8 GB of VRAM. Oh, and that video memory is also slower. Give it up for the plain old, but kind of new, AMD Radeon RX 9060.

If that doesn't sound like a hugely compelling proposition, perhaps it's not a surprise that AMD may not sell the new RX 9060 direct to gamers, but rather that it's thought to be a graphics card that's mostly if not exclusively intended for PC builders and system integrators, rather than we DIY enthusiasts.

Anyway, the precise specs involve 28 RDNA 4 compute units as opposed to the 32 of the RX 9060 XT. Oddly, AMD isn't quoting a clock speed for the "new" GPU, which is likely using a cut down version of the same Navi 44 silicon as the 9060 XT.

However, AMD has quoted the raw computational throughput of the GPU, including Peak Single Precision (FP32 Vector) Performance of 21.4 TFLOPs. By the same measure, AMD rates the 9060 XT at 25.6 TFLOPS. Do the maths and you'll find the 9060 XT's rated performance is slightly beyond the 24.5 TFLOPS you'd expect from simply scaling up the number of compute units from 28 to 32.

In other words, to arrive at 25.6 TFOPS, you need to run higher clocks on the XT. There are some indications the boost clock of the new non-XT is 2,990 MHz versus the 3,130 MHz of the XT cards thanks to this listing of an XFX branded card.

Why AMD doesn't want to quote clock speeds directly isn't clear. But it has given us memory speed. Where the 9060 XT is specified with 20 Gbps GDDR6, the non-XT makes do with 18 Gbps chips. The net result is a reduction in bandwidth from 320 GB/s to 288 GB/s.

All told, the 9060 isn't a major hatchet job. Broadly speaking, you're probably looking at a 15% GPU performance drop versus the existing 9060 XT 8GB. But, as ever, the issue is that 8 GB of VRAM, which is proving an increasing limitation, even at the 1080p resolution at which AMD seems to be pitching this GPU.

Notably, AMD has provided some performance numbers at "Native 1080p Ultra Settings", including 108 FPS in Assassin's Creed Mirage, 98 FPS for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, 153 FPS in DOOM Eternal (RT) and 67 FPS for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The equivalent product page for the XT model doesn't have comparable numbers.

However, the 9060 XT 16 GB's page does, the difference being AMD has gone with 1440p performance for that GPU. That's the impact the upgrade from 8 GB to 16 GB makes, it seems.

Whatever, the 9060 XT 8 GB current has a $299 MSRP, so this non-XT model will presumably come in below that. However, it remains to be seen if it will be offered as a direct buy for DIY gamers and if so at what price level.

AMD is getting back into the enthusiast class GPU game. So says YouTube outlet Moore's Law is Dead. Perhaps even more excitingly, it reckons AMD is cooking up another new GPU with Nvidia RTX 5080 performance that will sell for just $550.

Obviously, the usual caveats apply. That channel hardly has an immaculate track record. But this "leak" looks particularly plausible, including a purported internal slide from AMD itself. So, let's get into the details.

In broad brush terms, AMD is said to be planning two main GPUs for its next-gen graphics architecture. Moore's Law refers to it as RDNA 5, while AMD has previously said it will be moving to a unified architecture for both gaming and AI known as UDNA.

If that's semantics, the two GPU dies themselves look fascinating. The first, codenamed AT0, is supposedly an absolute monster. It seems to exist primarily as a workstation AI GPU, similar to how Nvidia RTX 5090 are commandeered for running local AI models in workstations, as opposed to its dedicated Blackwell GPUs that go into AI server racks.

But, just as Nvidia's GB102 GPU can be used for both AI workloads and for gaming in the form of the RTX 5090, AMD's AT0 will also spawn a pure gaming graphics card. And, despite being a bit cut down from the AI variant, it's said to still be a beast that should be capable of going up against Nvidia's next-gen flagship, which we'll call the RTX 6090 for argument's sake.

How much of a beast? It's said to have 154 compute units, even in cut-down gaming form, plus a 384-bit memory bus and 36 GB of GDDR7 memory. For context, AMD's current top RDNA 4-based gaming graphics card, the Radeon RX 9070 XT, has just 64 compute units.

If you further assume that AMD's next-gen compute units are likely more performant than RDNA, you'll have well over double the number of compute units, each with superior performance to those in a 9070 XT. Now, you can see how it's thought this thing is designed to go up against Nvidia's next-gen halo gaming GPU.

But what of the other GPU die in this new generation of AMD graphics? Actually, it could be more interesting, still. That is said to carry the same number of compute units or CUs as the 9070 XT, so 64. But they'll be more capable, especially when it comes to ray tracing, and clock higher, the result of which will be performance somewhere around an RTX 5080.

But here's the kicker. The target price for this GPU, codenamed AT2, is claimed by Moore's Law is Dead to be $550. So, that's RTX 5080 performance for roughly half price. Well, it is in terms of MSRP. Street prices, as ever, are another thing. What's more, this smaller GPU is said to be slated for use as a graphics chiplet in future high-performance APUs. It could also do duty in future Xbox devices. If true, it will be a very important little graphics chip.

Incidentally, the use of this smaller AT2 die in various applications seems to be the limit of AMD's "chiplet" strategy for GPUs. A few years ago, the expectation was that AMD would build up all kinds of GPU using small generic GPU chiplets, just as it does with CPUs using CPU core chiplets. But that plan seems to have been dropped, at least for now.

If there's a snag to all this, it's the expected release date, which is early 2027 for the desktop graphics cards according to Moore's Law is Dead. That's a little disappointing. On the one hand, it maps with the usual two-year release cadence for gaming GPU generations, what with RDNA 4 and the RX 9070 and 9070 XT arriving earlier in 2025.

On the other, RDNA 4 itself was late by that very same cadence, and should have been released in 2024. So, getting things back on track would see these new AMD chips, whether you call then RDNA 5 or UDNA, out in the second half of next year.

Of course, whether it's late next year or some time in 2027, either way these GPUs are quite a long way out. No doubt much can change in the interim, but AMD will certainly have a pretty clear idea of what it intends to launch for its next generation GPUs at this point.

To hit that late 2026 or early 2027 window, the design of the GPUs will have already been finalised. So, if this leak does indeed come from AMD, there's every reason to take it seriously.

It's also worth noting that AMD has form when is comes to launching a true high-end competitor for Nvidia every second or third generation. It opted out of the high end for RDNA 4, and if you recall for the original RDNA generation. But it had a pop with RDNA 2 and RDNA 3, courtesy of the Radeon RX 6900 XT and 7900 XTX GPUs, respectively.

Wind the clock back further, and you'll find AMD dipping in and out of the high-end gaming segment, pretty much on a whim. Moreover, AMD has made noises in the past about wanting to focus on mainstream gaming, just as it did for RDNA 4, only to turn around the following generation and take a stab at the enthusiast class.

Anywho, we'll have to see how this all pans out. Plenty of questions remain, even if this leak is accurate. We've no idea, for instance, how much effort AMD has put into improving ray tracing for the next gen.

When it comes to image quality, the latest FSR 4 iteration of its upscaling technology definitely made AMD highly competitive with Nvidia's DLSS. But game support? Not so much. Which is why the OptiScaler tool is so handy. And so vexing when it comes to AMD itself.

OptiScaler has been updated so that it now effectively supports running AMD's FSR 4 in any game that supports DLSS 2+ or FSR 2+ and doesn't use the Vulkan API or anti-cheat technology.

Of course, the caveat is that you need a GPU based on AMD's latest RDNA 4 tech, such as the Radeon RX 9070 XT, to run FSR 4 at all. Oh, there's another caveat. For switching on FSR 4 with OptiScaler, it takes more than just a couple of mouse clicks.

In fact, for FSR 4 you have to manually install it by copy-pasting files into specific game directories, different for each title, with further settings to adjust upon install per game via a bat script.

Still, if the modding community can do it, even in this somewhat user unfriendly format, the question is why AMD can't. The official list of titles that support FSR 4 can be found here. And, frankly, it is not impressive. There are 65 titles, total, and the majority are hardly AAA classics.

So, why doesn't AMD provide a similar capability to inject FSR 4 into a wider list of games? AMD made a net profit of over $709 million on revenues of $7.4 billion in the first quarter of 2025. So, any notion that it lacks the resources doesn't bear even cursory scrutiny.

It's frustrating because FSR 4, with its transition to AI-powered upscaling, was a major step forward for AMD. By most analyses, FSR 4's image quality falls somewhere Nvidia's DLSS 3 and its latest transformer-based DLSS 4 upscaling. FSR 3, by contrast, is generally viewed to be inferior to DLSS 3.

So, AMD has done all the difficult, expensive work getting FSR 4 developed and running nicely, only to skimp at the final implementation and game support, thereby doing a pretty effective job of undermining it.

A cynic might argue that AMD has form when it comes to this sort thing. Developing great hardware and software and then not quite finishing the job doesn't feel totally novel for AMD.

Anywho, the good news is that you may well have an option for trying to get FSR 4 running on your favourite title, provided it didn't fall at the Vulkan or anti-cheat hurdle. And if it's a game you spend a lot of time on, the slight phaff of the initial setup via OptiScaler is hardly the end of the world.

Earlier this week, senior vice president of AMD Jack Huynh and PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny revisited their co-engineering effort with a glittering cross-section of quartz. Alright, they've got my attention. Named after the purple stone the two tech heads are seen posing beside, Project Amethyst began back in 2023 as an AMD-Sony collaboration intended to deliver "smarter, more efficient solutions" that both companies can then reap the rewards of, such as "Super Resolution in FSR 4."

On Tuesday, Huynh wrote that this collaboration is currently working towards "paving the way for machine learning based Frame Generation and Ray Regeneration in FSR Redstone."

To briefly recap, the latest, machine learning-enhanced version of AMD's upscaler FSR 4 was announced back in February, with a glimpse of its Redstone update following in May. What the aforementioned AMD-Sony collaboration means in the near future is that owners of base PS5's may want to upgrade to the Pro when it gets FSR 4 in 2026.

According to an interview with Mark Cerny from Tom's Guide, FSR 4 is intended to be a mostly painless "drop-in replacement for the current PSSR"—'PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution' is Sony's current upscaling tech for its Pro consoles. But this isn't PlayStation Gamer, so what does that mean for PC hardware heads?

Well, for one thing, it means that both tech companies are growing increasingly intertwined; to ignore PlayStation in this equation really is missing the bigger picture as there's arguably more than a little PlayStation in the latest AMD cards. That said, this isn't a case of copied homework but more a 'sharing is caring' approach (which certainly makes a change from the big tech slap fights of recent memory).

Mark Cerny tells Tom's Guide, "[Project Amethyst is not in aid of] proprietary technology. This is really trying to move the industry forward. Obviously we want to use these technologies on our consoles, but these technologies are available to any of AMD's customers freely."

Rising tides lifting at least these two boats? At any rate, if you've got an RDNA 3 AMD card and you want to enjoy all the framerate and resolution improvements offered by FSR 4, you're also going to need to upgrade. Just as base PS5 consoles can't handle the upscale upgrade to FSR 4, older AMD cards can't either. As Cerny also told Tom's Guide, "It's not a cut-down [version] of the algorithm—it's the full-fat version of the co-developed super resolution that we'll be releasing on PS5 Pro."

In short, you'll need to pick up an RDNA 4 GPU if you want to go hands-on with Redstone's machine learnings. But what about the less immediate longer term? As you may or may not know, a big chunk of my early career was spent writing for print publications focussed on all things PlayStation. That doesn't mean I think the next Radeon graphics card will essentially be a mini-PlayStation, though Cerny's fingerprints will undoubtedly be all over the RDNA 4-successor codenamed GFX13.

Cerny shares, "Big chunks of RDNA 5, or whatever AMD ends up calling it, are coming out of [the] engineering I am doing on the project. And again, this is coming out of trying to move things forward. There are no restrictions on the way any of it can be used."

GPU overclocking and tweaking tool Afterburner has been the app of choice for countless PC gamers around the world since it first launched way back in the late 2000s. Since then, it's supported almost every graphics card to appear on the market, but as things currently stand, it doesn't fully support AMD's Radeon RX 9070 and 9060 GPUs because MSI doesn't make RDNA 4 cards. Fortunately, Afterburner's developer has a plan to get around this problem.

If you've never used it before, Afterburner is a small program that displays real-time information about your graphics card's clock speeds, temperatures, power consumption, and so on. It also offers tools to overclock the GPU and VRAM, tweak voltages, and along with RivaTuner Statistics Server, provide an in-game overlay showing the above details.

Right from the very beginning, it was the work of one person, Alexey Nicolaychuk (aka Unwinder), until MSI got involved. Even then, the bulk of the updates were handled by Nicolaychuk, though in recent years, Afterburner has been rather slow at keeping up-to-date with all of the very latest GPU releases.

This has been very much the case with AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs in the Radeon RX 9000 series, and it's for one very simple reason: MSI doesn't make AMD graphics cards anymore, so it was unable to provide hardware, plus the vital GPU ID and driver details, required for Afterburner to work properly. But fear not, as Unwinder has worked out a solution to this by himself, as he explained in a post on the Guru3D forums.

"As you know, due to some unknown reason MSI decided to skip RDNA4 and focus on manufacturing NVIDIA GPU based solutions only this round. This means that I get no MSI RDNA4 hardware samples for development, so there is no RX 9070 XT support in MSI Afterburner yet.

But I decided to close this gap myself and grabbed third party hardware vendor's 9070 XT special to add unofficial support for it. So next beta with RDNA4 support is around the corner, and MSI AB is a bit PowerColor AB now."

For the review of the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9060 XT, we used AMD's Adrenalin software (above) to investigate overclocking and voltage tweaking. It does work really well and you can alter a huge number of settings, but hoo boy, does AMD love to hide all its features under multiple menu layers.

We'll be glad to see the next beta version of Afterburner with RDNA 4 support for sure. Somehow, though, I don't think it'll be launched as MSI/PowerColor Afterburner, though!

AMD has added a pair of "new" APUs to its Z2 family of chips. The catch is that neither seem to be actually new and at least one of them is dubious when it comes to offering much of interest to gamers. What's more, the net result is that the Z2 line of APUs has become even more baffling and is now composed of no fewer than four generations of AMD chips, all under the same branding.

The first of the new chips is the AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme. It's basically the existing Ryzen Z2 Extreme APU based on Strix Point but with that chip's 50 TOPS NPU enabled. Previously, AMD hasn't bothered to enable Strix Point's NPU for handheld gaming PCs.

Other specifications, including a total of eight CPU cores, three of which are full Zen 5 spec, the other five Zen 5C spec, and 16 RDNA 3.5 graphics compute units, appear to be carried over from the Ryzen Z2 Extreme. AMD isn't quoting clockpeeds, but the AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme has the same 15 W to 35 W TDP range as the non-AI model.

As for why, exactly, you'd want an NPU in a gaming handheld, AMD told us, "the addition of an NPU in the Ryzen Z2 Extreme brings low-power, on-device AI capabilities to handheld gaming for the first time. While AI in handhelds is still emerging, developers are rapidly exploring uses like upscaling, adaptive gameplay, and smarter NPCs. Offloading these tasks to the integrated NPU allows the CPU and GPU to stay focused on core game performance, enabling richer experiences without trade-offs in responsiveness or battery life.

"More importantly, it positions handhelds to support the next generation of AI-enabled gaming, with real-time personalisation and smarter, more interactive gameplay. AMD is working closely with partners to bring these capabilities to life and lead the transition to AI-powered gaming both on the PC and in handheld devices."

On paper, an NPU could be handy given that Nvidia's competing GPUs have more dedicated AI hardware in the form of Tensor cores for accelerating features like ML-enhanced upscaling. What's more, the RDNA 3.5 GPU in Strix Point isn't as capable when it comes to AI as AMD's latest RDNA 4 technology, as seen in the RX 9060 XT and RX 9070 XT desktop graphics chips. Even RDNA 4's ML hardware isn't truly comparable with Nvidia's Tensor cores.

That said, there's absolutely no indication that AMD intends to offload the likes of its latest FSR 4 ML-powered upscaling off the GPU and onto an NPU at any point in the future anyways. So that benefit is theoretical, for now.

As for the other "new" APU, that's known as the AMD Ryzen Z2 A. This one is even weirder, since it sports four Zen 2-era CPU cores and eight RDNA 2 graphics compute units. If you're thinking that sounds familiar, well, those are precisely the same specs as the Van Gogh APU (Aerith) in Steam Deck and the die shrunk version of the same chip in the Steam Deck OLED (Sephiroth).

Indeed, we would be pretty surprised if the AMD Ryzen Z2 A isn't simply the Steam Deck chip rebranded as a Z2 APU. The only potential difference we can see is that it's offering a slightly higher configurable TDP at 6 - 20 W instead of the 5 - 15 W on offer with the Steam Deck OLED. Either way, it's old technology and means that the Z2 family now contains chips from no fewer than four generations of AMD APU architecture.

Along with Strix Point in the Z2 Extreme models and (likely) Van Gogh for the Z2 A, there's the plain old Ryzen Z2 which uses the last-gen Hawk Point APU with eight Zen 4 CPU cores and 12 RDNA 3 graphics CUs. Finally, there's the Ryzen Z2 Go based on the Rembrant APU with four Zen 3+ CPU cores and 12 RDNA 2 spec graphics CUs. For now that's exclusive to Lenovo in the Lenovo Legion Go S handheld.

Long story short, the Z2 moniker basically means nothing from a hardware generation standpoint, and has been applied to a wide range of essentially unrelated APUs, each sporting dramatically different generations of CPU and GPU technology.

As for what to make of it all, well the Z2 A could be interesting despite being old and relatively underpowered. It could, for instance, be used to create a generation of very low cost handhelds running Steam OS but not sold by Valve itself.

By dint of running exactly the same chip as the official Steam Deck, any such machine ought to be perfectly optimised to run games targeted at the official Deck but could be available for less money. Then again, the Deck seems to be made to pretty tight margins, so significantly undercutting the $399 entry-level non-OLED Steam Deck in particular could be a tall order.

The AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme is less appealing. It'll presumably be more expensive than the existing non-AI chip and it's not clear what benefits it will bring to gaming, if any. Meanwhile, exactly why AMD thinks it's a good idea to call all of these chips "Z2" is beyond baffling. But then confusing branding is hardly a novel concept when it comes to AMD.

AMD's share of the add-in graphics card market fell to a fairly pitiful 8% in the first quarter of 2025 according to Jon Peddie Research (JPR), a specialist in tracking PC hardware sales. Meanwhile, JPR puts Intel's graphics market share at essentially zero, with Nvidia hoovering up the remaining 92%. Ouch.

Before we all escalate the threat level to PC gaming to DEFCON 1 and panic, it should be noted that JPR's figures cover the period up to the end of March. AMD's new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT were only released on March 6. So, that's only three and a bit weeks of RDNA 4 sales in the figures.

In other words, we'll have to wait for the Q2 numbers to get a full picture of how much impact AMD's new GPUs have had. Indeed, we'll arguably have to wait even longer than that, since it's the RX 9060 XT, which only went on sale yesterday, that's meant to be the real volume play for AMD and that won't have a substantial impact on market share figures until the Q3 data is out.

Overall, GPU sales were up 8.5% in Q1 2025 compared to Q4 2024. JPR says that Q1 is usually flat or down compared to the previous quarter, but that, "In Q1’25, AMD and Nvidia introduced new AIBs, which stimulated the market."

If we'll have to wait a little longer to see how the RX 9070 and 9060 GPUs fare for AMD, the verdict on Intel's Arc B570 and B580 GPUs is surely in and it not good news, not good news at all.

JPR reckons Intel's market share fell by 1.2% in the latest quarter, essentially putting it on 0% and not appearing in the data for Q1 2025. If there was already doubt over Intel's commitment to the add-in graphics card market, this apparent total failure of Intel's second-gen Battlemage generation of GPUs is extremely troubling.

Battlemage GPUs went on sale at the end of 2024. So, in theory Q1 2025 was a full quarter for sales of Intel's latest graphics hardware. Obviously sales of the B570 and B580 haven't actually been zero. But if JPR is to be believed, the volumes are so small as to effectively push Intel out of its data.

If even half a percent of sales were going to Intel, JPR would no doubt have included that in its data. So, we're talking less than one in 200 GPUs sales being Intel cards, and quite possibly an order of magnitude or more worse than that.

It really is a grim outlook for Intel graphics and puts rumours of more powerful Battlemage GPUs into context. With sales this low, is it remotely realistic to expect Intel to wheel out that purported Nvidia RTX 4070 / 5070 killer? It doesn't seem terribly plausible in the light of this latest data.

Still, the numbers we're really looking forward to will be Q3 2025, when both of AMD's new RDNA 4 GPUs will have had at least a full quarter on sale. That data probably won't be out until the end of the year. So, check back in December and cross all your fingers and toes until then.

Will AMD's new Radeon RX 9060 XT be a saviour for gamers on a modest budget? That's the hope as the new GPU's June 5 launch day approaches. Of course, with the card so close to availability, you might expect a few leaks. And sure enough an RX 9060 XT has popped up in Geekbench, as spotted by X user Benchleaks (the clue is in the name!).

Geekbench obviously isn't our favourite metric for a GPU. An actual game would be far better. A benchmark that uses something like a 3D game engine would be next best. But Geekbench is what we have, so what does it tell us?

Well, the RX 9060 XT notches up 109,315 points in OpenCL. For context, the official Geekbench results list puts an Nvidia RTX 5060 at over 120,000 points and the last-gen RX 6600 XT at a little over 80,000 points.

In the Vulkan test, the 9060 XT notches up 124,251 points. That's more competitive with the RTX 5060, which is listed at a little under 120,000 points.

Of course, AMD is claiming the RX 9060 XT is actually faster than the RTX 5060 Ti, let alone the plain RTX 5060. So, these Geekbench numbers look a little low in that context.

It's worth noting that these are not official results. They're not definitely representing a final retail RX 9060 XT or really any 9060 XT at all. Likewise, whatever drivers were being used likely aren't final.

In a way, the RX 9060 XT isn't much of a mystery in any case. It's exactly half an RX 9070 XT in terms of the hardware, including GPU cores, memory bus width, the works. However, with a boost clock of around 3.1 GHz, the RX 9060 XT runs slightly faster than the RX 9070 XT, which tops out at 2.97 GHz, officially.

Of course, the big appeal with the RX 9060 XT is price. The base 8 GB model is MSRP'ed at $299, with the 16 GB listed at $349. That's in line with the RTX 5060, which is also $299 and very attractive compared to the 16 GB version of the RTX 5060 Ti, which is listed at $429.

Of course, these are all MSRPs and real-world prices can vary. A lot! As with all GPUs these days, the appeal of the RX 9060 XT will likely hinge on retail pricing, the realities of which we'll know in just over a week. Watch this space.

We're finally getting into full swing of the current RDNA 4 and Blackwell GPU generation, with the less expensive cards appearing on the near horizon. On the AMD side that means an RX 9060 XT, which AMD is now all but confirming will be announced next week at Computex.

AMD's recent X post reminds us to join the company on May 21 "as we reveal what’s next in gaming, AI PCs, and more." The picture accompanying the post says AMD Radeon 9000-series in the bottom-right corner and there's a render of a two-fan Radeon graphics card on the left. We already knew AMD would be talking about gaming and AI on this date, but the RX 9000 card render adds almost certain credence to the expectation that we'll hear about the RX 9060 XT.

Given AMD already told us back in February that multiple "RX 9060 products" will be coming in the second quarter of 2025, I think it's safe to assume May 21 will mean the announcement of one such "RX 9060 product". Judging by recent leaks and even early retailer listings, this will presumably be an RX 9060 XT in two memory configurations rather than a non-XT, although there could still be non-XT cards announced too, I suppose.

It's also somewhat noteworthy that AMD says the pictured GPU is an "artistic render" and is "not available for purchase." In other words, there probably won't be an MBA (Made by AMD) version of the graphics card, just as there wasn't for the RX 9070 XT—well, putting aside likely engineering samples that turned up in China, that is.

One downside of there being no reference RX 9060 XT card, other than the fact that reference cards are coveted for branding and rarity, is that it'll mean no card that will consistently retail at MSRP. And judging by the AIB retailer listings that popped up last week—$449 and $519 for 8 GB and 16 GB versions—the lack of a reference card will most definitely be a shame.

The RX 9070 XT has an MSRP of $599 and the RX 9070 has an MSRP of $549, but if you check out even the cheapest graphics card deals today, you'll find these actually going for $860 and $750 at best, respectively.

So whatever the RX 9060 XT's MSRP ends up being—and presumably it will be close to the $379 MSRP for the RTX 5060 Ti 8 GB and $429 MSRP for the RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB—we should prepare ourselves for actual retailer prices above this. That's just the market right now, unfortunately. It's not impossible prices will be better this time around, but it's best to prepare for the worst and hope for the best, as they say.

We're expecting the RX 9060 XT to compete with the RTX 5060 Ti in performance, and the latest rumoured specs for the new AMD GPU have it as essentially an RX 9070 XT split in two, with half the shaders and half the memory bus. Which puts it in line with the previous-gen RX 7600 XT but with a higher boost clock, and of course an improved architecture and all that goes along with it, including FSR 4 frame gen and upscaling.

Nvidia is also set to launch the RTX 5060 next week on May 19, and Intel has been teasing an Arc B770 launch in replies to comments on its X post, too, so we'll be seeing things hot up at the low end of the current GPU generation.

It's just a question of stocks and pricing, as always: However 'hot' new graphics cards and MSRPs end up being, it means little if people can't get their hands on them for reasonable prices. These will be entry-level cards, after all, and people won't want to spend a fortune. Fingers crossed, then.

AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 9060 XT is meant to be about accessible gaming performance when it arrives, probably within a few weeks. But if a couple of listings that currently appear on Amazon (via Videocardz) are anything to go by, we may have to adjust expectations. The 8 GB variant of the GPU is listed for $449, with the 16 GB option at $519. Ouch.

Both of the cards are XFX-branded 'OC' GPUs. So, they may have MSRPs well above whatever AMD chooses as a base price for the RX 9060 XT twins—though as XFX "Swift" models, they are not from XFX's very highest tier of AIB cards. And, of course, MSRPs are only very loosely related to real-world pricing when it comes to graphics cards these days.

Despite all that, these prices still look awfully unappealing. By way of example, Nvidia's RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB, which is probably the closest existing competitor for the new AMD GPU, has an MSRP of $429. The 8 GB 5060 Ti is MSRP'ed at $379.

Real-world pricing is a little higher at roughly $420 for the 5060 Ti 8 GB and $480 for the 16 GB card. But that's still below these XFX RX 9060 XT listings, which hardly fits AMD's broader sales pitch for Radeon GPUs of late, that's centred around value and bang for buck.

The prices are also painfully unappealing in the context of AMD's own Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT boards. While the RX 9060 XT hasn't been officially announced, its specifications are fairly certain to be exactly one half of the 9070 XT and thus 2,048 stream processors and a 128-bit memory bus to the 4,096 processors and 256-bit bus of the 9070 XT.

Lest you have forgotten, the 9070 XT is MSRP'ed at $599, with the vanilla 9070 at $549. So, the idea you'd want to pay over $500 for half the GPU simply doesn't scan.

The catch is that the 9070 XT tends to go for well over MSRP, and that's if you can get it at all. Newegg, by way of example, lists 9070 XTs from about $660. But the cheapest actually in stock is up for a ridiculous $899.

Of course, US pricing is particularly bad right now. In the UK you can grab a 9070 XT for £660 easily enough. Above MSRP, to be sure, but not nearly as bad.

Arguably more of a problem is the fact that you can grab an Nvidia RTX 5070 in the US for just over $600 in the US and just over £500 in the UK. OK, you're only getting 12GB of VRAM with the 5070. But it's a fundamentally more powerful GPU and also offers Nvidia's industry-leading feature set, superior path tracing performance and all that stuff.

Anyway, we'll obviously have to wait and see where the new AMD GPUs land in terms of both MSRP and real-world pricing when they arrive, probably at Computex starting 20 May. But these Amazon listings hardly bode well.

For the record, the Amazon listings mention a June 5 release date. So, that's probably a relevant marker in terms of actual retail availability.

Images of an AMD Radeon 9070 GRE from graphics card maker Powercolor have emerged. Videocardz got hold of some snaps of the card and the box, the former looking a dead ringer for Powercolor's RX 9070 XT card, as pictured above.

Videocardz reckons the new GRE variant will only be available in China at first, but we'll have to wait for the launch to be sure where exactly it will go on sale.

In the meantime, the RX 9070 GRE is based on the same AMD Navi 48 chip as the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, but with some elements disabled. It's rumoured to run 3,072 Stream Processor cores. That compares with 3,584 for the vanilla 9070 and 4,096 for the 9070 XT.

The GRE is also expected to sport a 192-bit memory bus and 12 GB of GDDR6, both of which are a step down from the 256-bit bus and 16 GB of the other 9070 variants.

Consequently, the 9070 GRE ought to be significantly cheaper than the 9070 and 9070 XT, which have MSRPs of $549 and $599, respectively. Of course, you'd do well to buy either card at MSRP currently. It's tricky enough to grab one at all.

So, exactly where the RX 9070 GRE will land in terms of real-world pricing is just about anyone's guess. But it could be priced to take on the new Nvidia RTX 5060 TI, which is MSRP'ed at $379 for the 8 GB version and $429 for the 16 GB option.

You'd expect the 7090 GRE to have the edge over those cards for pure raster performance, but perhaps not for ray-tracing. Path tracing is arguably too big an ask for any card at this price point.

But Nvidia's typically strong feature set, including the ML upgrades that come with its latest DLSS 4 upscaler, not to mention multi-frame generation, means that the choice is rarely as simple as comparing basic raster performance.

Of course, the GRE may end up a China-only GPU, in which case the comparison will be moot in most markets. But we suspect it will make it to global markets at some point.

For now, there's no word on an official launch date. But with product images leaking, it probably won't be too far away.

AMD's Strix Point APU is a super little chip that's great in laptops and handheld PCs such as the new Razer Blade 16 and OneXPlayer OneXFly F1 Pro. Actually, it would be pretty nifty in a mini PC for the desktop, wouldn't it? Hopefully we'll find out later this year as AMD is reportedly plotting a Q4 2025 roll-out for the desktop version of Strix Point.

According to Benchlife, AMD will brand Strix Point for desktops as the "Ryzen 9000G", though we suspect AMD will insert "AI" in there somewhere. Perhaps Ryzen AI 9000G?

Either way, it's be the same Strix Point silicon that's been so successful in portable PCs. It gives you up to 12 Zen 5-spec CPU cores, with a mix of four full Zen 5 cores and eight more compact Zen 5c cores. On the graphics side, Strix Point packs 16 RDNA 3.5 graphics compute units while an AI-accelerating NPU is rated at 55 TOPS.

The chip is expected to be packaged for the AM5 socket, so should slot into a fairly wide range of existing AMD compatible motherboards. The example here is the existing AMD Ryzen 8000G series, featuring the Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G, which are both based on the last-gen Phoenix APU.

They offer, up to eight Zen 4 CPU cores and 12 RDNA 3-spec graphics units, plus a 16 TOPs NPU. The Ryzen 8000 chips also drop into the AM5 socket.

In theory, you might expect the desktop iteration of Strix Point to clock a little higher than in laptop and handheld applications. By rights you should actually be able to pair the new Strix Point desktop APUs with a discrete GPU, but if it's pure performance you're after, a dedicated desktop CPU-plus-GPU combo will still be by far the best bet.

Instead, it's as a chip for a teeny tiny mini PC, maybe something like the Ayaneo Retro Mini PC AM01S we spotted last week, where Strix Point on the desktop makes most sense. It's not the stuff of a gaming powerhouse. More a strong all-rounder in a very compact form factor.

Indeed, the Ayaneo Retro Mini PC AM01S will indeed be offered with Strix Point, but using the chip in its mobile packaging branded as the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (as shown in the image at the top). Mobile chips tend to go for more money than equivalent desktops, so a desktop Strix Point will probably make for a more cost-effective mini PC.

Obviously as a rumour rather than official launch, there's no word as yet on pricing and precise availability. But loop back later in the year and we'll hopefully have full details.

AMD's next-gen APU has apparently leaked. But don't get too excited because "Gorgon Point", as it's known, looks very much like a refresh of AMD's current Strix Point chip rather than a radical advance or really even a new chip at all.

AMD was reportedly making a presentation to its commercial partners, likely including laptop and handheld PC makers, when the slides in question were captured, only to be posted online by Korean X user harukaze5719.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the post in question how now been deleted, but equally unsurprisingly not before its contents were preserved for posterity. So, what do they show?

For the most part, a very, very similar chip to Strix Point, as seen in various laptops and latterly in a few handhelds including the OneXPlayer OneXFly F1 Pro. Gorgon Point has not only the same 12 Zen 5-spec CPU cores (likely in 4x Zen 5 and 8x Zen 5c arrangement) but also the same 16 CUs of RDNA 3.5 graphics.

It also has an XDNA 2-spec NPU and that's where the first clear upgrade comes in as in these slides, with the NPU rated at "55+ TOPS". Strix Point's APU is rated at 50 TOPS.

However, the slides also include some broader CPU performance uplifts, albeit slight. Gorgon Point is shown delivering a roughly three to five percent uplift in single and multithreading running Cinebench R23 across a range of power envelopes from 15 W up to 45 W.

That performance step likely comes from a small clock speed increase. The slides show the top Gorgon point APU hits a boost clock of 5.2 GHz, whereas the existing Ryzen AI HX 375 peaks at 5.1 GHz.

All told, then, this looks more like a minor stepping than a properly new chip. The slides do not reveal what process node Gorgon Point is built on, but based on all the carry-over specs and marginal performance uplift it's almost certainly the same TSMC N4 node as Strix Point.

Probably the most disappointing element is the RDNA 3.5 graphics, especially now that AMD has released its first RDNA 4 desktop GPUs to broad acclaim. Gorgon Point is listed on the slides as a 2026 product and RDNA 4 is a little behind Nvidia when it comes to features, so the idea that AMD will be rolling out new laptop APUs with significantly outdated graphics hardware in 2026 isn't hugely appealing.

Of course, an upgrade to RDNA 4 would require a major redesign. And the carried-over RDNA 3.5 graphics tally with AMD's reticence earlier this year to confirm that RDNA 4 would be available in mobile format.

With Gorgon Point seemingly sticking with RDNA 3.5 graphics next year, it's looking increasingly likely that AMD's next major graphics update for laptop and handheld APUs could be the UDNA architecture that unifies AMD's RDNA gaming graphics line with its CDNA compute technology.

For laptops, that's not the end of the world. If you want proper gaming performance in a laptop, Nvidia will do you a great GPU albeit at a painful price. Instead, the problem is that Gorgon Point looks like it won't bring much of a boost for handheld gaming PCs, which is a bit of a pity. Therefore, perhaps pencil in 2027 at the earliest for the next really significant handheld gaming boost from AMD.

After the tantalising tidbit of information that AMD has carved out a 45% market share in Japan comes a much bigger bomb from the company's CEO. Dr. Lisa Su says that the Radeon RX 9070 XT is bar far the best-selling AMD Radeon GPU ever and by a factor of 10. Yes, really.

Is there a catch? Well, she was only talking about first-week sales. Speaking to Asus rep Ordinary Uncle Tony(otherwise known as Tony Yu and Asus's General Manager for China), Su said, "the 9070 XT has been a fantastic success. Actually, it's been the number one selling for all of the AMD Radeon generations for first-week sales by far, 10x higher than previous generations."

Su doesn't put actual figures on it, so it's hard to know how that translates into actual volumes. And of course, bumper sales for a week and then no availability for months, by way of example, wouldn't necessarily mean impressive overall volumes.

So, arguably the real question is long-term availability, not first-week sales. On that subject, Su says, "we're increasing the manufacturing so that we can have more gamers who have access." Again, the lack of specifics is a little frustrating even if we applaud the general sentiment.

Predictably, Su emphasised AMD's current focus on bringing features and performance to the relative mainstream of the market. "Everyone likes a very, very high-end GPU, but not so many people can access it," Su observes, adding that AMD remains committed to bringing, "the best gaming capability to a good price point."

Among other topics, Ordinary Uncle Tony also asked Su for her take on the view that chip manufacturing costs seem to be escalating while the performance benefits of new nodes are diminishing.

"It is true that the silicon scaling is getting more difficult. We saw this trend for the last five-plus years," Su says. The solution? Su thinks silicon still has some legs, but that it will require some companion technologies to maximise returns.

"From AMD's standpoint, we have invested in next-generation technologies, for example, our chiplet packaging technology. Our 3D stacking is another example," she says. "I think silicon still has a long way to go, but we have to continue to optimise not just on silicon but on package and also on system and also with software."

Anywho, it will certainly be interesting to see both how available AMD GPUs are over the coming months and then what impact that has on AMD's broader market share when the usual data-collating suspects chime in later this year with their estimates. Long story short, it seems clear there's major demand for AMD's new GPUs, the question is whether the company will actually make enough of them to gain significant market share. Watch this space.

An AMD spokesperson has claimed that Radeon gaming graphics cards now have 45% market share in Japan. This appears to be something of a surprise to the AMD rep, referred to as Mr. Sato, who said that the company, "isn't used to selling graphics cards". Er, righto...!

According to Japanese website ASCII (via Google translate), AMD was attending an "influencer" event alongside several AIB partners including ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte and PowerColor when the 45% market share claim was made. Reportedly, however, those board partners expressed concern about future sales due to limited GPU supply.

Despite that, the ASRock rep, referred to as Mr. Haraguchi, aspired to even greater market share for AMD. "We're below the majority. We're the opposition party, so let's aim for 70%," he said.

While we can't verify AMD's claims, they do stand to reason. Such has been the paucity of availability of Nvidia's new RTX 50-series graphics cards, at least by any metric to which we are aware, that it's hard to imagine that AMD isn't making pretty major inroads into Nvidia's market share.

In fact, it would be easy to believe that AMD has been selling more graphics cards since the launch of its new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT GPUs than Nvidia currently is with its pretty much impossible to buy RTX 50-series cards.

Of course, the new AMD pairing haven't even been on sale for fully two weeks and AMD's very recent successes are arguably as much about pure availability as a clear competitive advantage. Nvidia GPUs supplies seem to be so low, that almost any reasonable level of AMD availability is bound to be greater.

All of that could change in a flash should Nvidia pull out the stops on RTX 50 production and actually inject decent volume into the GPU market. So, it will be interesting to see later this year when various market research outfits publish figures just where AMD and Nvidia's market share end up.

JPR's most recent figures, by way of example, put AMD at 17% for the last quarter of 2024, up by 7%, which obviously predated the release of the new AMD cards. The first quarter of 2025 which runs until the end of March will likewise largely exclude sales of those GPUs. So, it will be Q2 2025 where we'll really get a feel for any medium to long term market share gains for AMD.

It's hard to imagine AMD won't further substantial gains in the next few quarters. But as the data we posted in that JPR story demonstrates, AMD's market share has been consistently on the slide since as far back as 2005, almost regardless of the quality of its graphics offerings. Will this time actually be any different?

"What can AMD do to ensure availability at close to MSRP as you can get it?" That was the question put to AMD's David McAfee regarding the company's new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT graphics cards. We'll come to his answer momentarily, but to provide a little context, Chinese graphics card maker Yeston reckons supply of AMD's new GPUs will become more stable "after April".

While supplies of AMD's new GPUs haven't been as awful as those of Nvidia's RTX 50-series graphics cards, they still sold out fast. Since launch day, restocking has been sporadic and pricing has tended to be well above MSRP.

That's the context for the question above, posed by Hot Hardware. And the answer? In reality, McAfee doesn't have too many revelations to share. "Priority number one is restocking all of our partners," he says.

"We want to make sure that users are able to buy cards at prices that they expect to see in the market. We're doing everything we can to make that happen. And make sure that both retailers and etailers as well as our board partners are doing their part to help ensure there's plenty of supply at those prices points.

"As we refill from what happened last week, you'll see more supply coming across not just the opening price points but across the entire range."

On the face of it, that ties in, albeit not absolutely specifically, with AIB partner Yeston's expectations for supply normalising after April (for the record, Yeston only sells directly into the Chinese market). Hopefully that will prove the case. In the meantime, there are two further take-aways from McAfee's responses.

First, RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT launches were a smash hit. "It has been a pretty amazing couple of weeks," McAfee says. "The launch of RDNA 4 was a milestone event for our graphics business. The demand was very, very, very strong all around the world."

The second is a recognition of how the graphics card market works. "There are pieces of the graphics business that are far more complicated when it comes to putting product in the market," he explains.

Long story short, while AMD sells CPUs directly into the market, with GPUs it supplies a chip to graphics card makers, who then make decisions about various board designs to offer, some which may be targeted at MSRP, others with added features they hope will command a premium price.

After that, retailers choose what mix of the various board designs they want to stock. "It's something that we don't honestly directly control," McAfee says.

While true, that ignores the fact GPU vendors including AMD itself can and do commission their own reference designs which are sold directly to gamers. AMD opted not to do that itself this time around. So, it definitely does lose some control in that respect, but it made a positive choice to relinquish that control.

What happens from here is unclear. Most indications imply that supply of AMD's new GPUs was pretty substantial at launch—largely down to a delayed launch with supply sitting in retail from January—but the sheer level of pent up demand for a vaguely affordable GPU with next-gen performance and features was such that the cards still sold out in a blink.

Indeed, as I type these words, not a single AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU is in stock on Newegg, which is largely reflective of current availability. So, the question is: How much demand remains and how many GPUs can AMD supply?

By later this summer, for instance, will you just be able to jump online and buy an AMD Radeon RX 9070, or an Nvidia RTX 5070 for that matter? You know, like almost every other consumer product? If that happens, prices will probably normalise, too. But we've been waiting for that to happen to the GPU market for absolutely years now. Cross your fingers, but probably don't hold your breath.

AMD's graphics rep, Frank Azor, has appealed to gamers not to "despair" over pricing of the company's new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT GPUs. He says AMD is working with AIBs to replenish stock and that, "MSRP pricing will continue to be encouraged."

The RX 9070 and 9070 XT graphics cards went on sale yesterday. Unlike the release of the Nvidia RTX 5070 the day before, there were actually some MSRP-priced cards to be had. Inevitably, they sold out fast, but there was at least some availability at MSRP.

Azor's post referring to "phenomenal" demand reflects the fact that, as I write these words, AMD's new graphics cards are totally sold out on big retailers like Best Buy and Newegg.

Meanwhile, some industry observers have questioned how "real" the 9070 and 9070 XT's MSRP prices actually are. Claims have been circulating that AMD has distributed rebates to retailers in order to allow them to hit the MSRP, variously reported at $50, $60 and even $100.

The narrative here is that retailers had built up stock prior to launch based on a higher MSRP, only for AMD to reduce that MSRP just before the public unveiling of pricing, forcing the need for a rebate to hit those new MSRPs.

Whether that actually happened is very hard to say. However, it should presumably be more straightforward by at least some measures to hit MSRP with a second wave of supply. In other words, there shouldn't be a need for a rebate.

On the other hand, tariffs are threatening to push prices up. As of today, or at least this precise moment, tariffs of 20% apply to goods coming into the US from China. Most if not all graphics cards are currently assembled in China. So presumably that 20% would apply.

Of course, it's anyone's guess how long those tariffs will remain in place. The Trump Administration yesterday walked back once again on tariffs impacting Canada and Mexico, so it's very hard to predict how long the China tariff may or may not apply.

As ever, time will tell. We'll have to wait and see whether MSRP-priced 9070s and 9070 XTs pop up again soon. If they do, they will look like awfully good deals versus the Nvidia RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti competition.

Compared MSRP-for-MSRP, the AMD cards looked pretty interesting, with the 9070 priced on parity with an RTX 5070 but comfortably outperforming it by most metrics and the 9070 XT coming close to the RTX 5070 Ti's frame rates for $150 less.

However, if you're comparing AMD at MSRP versus Nvidia at the typically much inflated prices the two 5070-based cards go for, then it's pretty much no contest. You'd go AMD.

If ever a new GPU family has been all about the money, it's AMD's RDNA 4, otherwise known as the new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT. At last we have official pricing from today's live stream, so here goes. The Radeon RX 9070 will be $549 and the Radeon RX 9070 XT is yours for $599. Hurrah!

That is both better and very much in line with our worst fears, which were based on a leaked slide from AMD pointing out that 85% of graphics cards sell for under $700 and which lined up with some Microcenter listings showing the XT model slotting in at $699 with the non-XT at $649.

The better bit is obviously the $100 discount versus those $699 and $649 rumours. In our heart of hearts, we were hoping the XT might come in at $499 and really blow a massive hole in Nvidia's RTX 50 line up, undercutting the RTX 5070 at the same time as massively out performing it.

That was probably never realistic. As it is and going on AMD's data for both raster and ray-tracing performance, the XT probably lines up either side of the RTX 5070 Ti for those two performance metrics while coming in fully $150 lower.

$599 isn't exactly chump change. But it's still something of a hallelujah moment for gamers starved for anything even remotely resembling good value in the graphics card market.

On the other hand, the small price gap between the two GPUs is as expected and that makes the XT just 9% more expensive. However, for that 9% more money, the XT gives you 4,096 shader cores versus 3,548 for the non-XT. That's a 15% uplift. But wait, the XT also has a boost clock of 2.97 GHz versus 2.52 GHz for the non-XT, that's another 18% advantage.

All told, AMD puts the 9070 XT's raw single-precision shader throughput at 48.7 TFLOPS, with the non-XT at 36.1 TFLOPS. That works out to a computational advantage of 35% for the XT for just 8% more cash.

Of course, the real-world frame rate gap will likely be a bit smaller than the TFLOPS performance. But the non-XT still looks like a bum deal. There was a time when you got more frames per dollar on lower-end GPU, but sadly those days seem to be behind us.

At least they do according to the official MSRPs. Unfortunately, of late graphics card MSRPs are proving about as relevant to real-world prices as fusion reactor is to cost-effective home heating. So, it's hard to say how much more the XT will actually cost when it hits store shelves, presumably for about three picoseconds before selling out.

For the record, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT go on sale on March 6, just one day after Nvidia's RTX 5070 is released on March 5. It'll be interesting to see if any of them are available at MSRP and if so for how long.

There are tentative reasons to be hopeful about GPU supply, at least from Nvidia following its most recent earnings call where the company said it expects revenues from gaming graphics to improve "as supply inceases."

On a closing note, it says something about how bananas the GPU market has become that a $599 graphics card might be seen as an unambiguous value proposition and something of a saviour for mainstream gaming. But, apparently, that's where we are.

After a relatively muted 'launch' at CES 2025, AMD's next-generation GPU architecture, RDNA 4, has been left to leaks and rumours, as to how much better it's going to be compared to previous Radeon iterations. One tech site, however, is claiming that it has the real deal—AMD's own performance claims—and depending on what you were hoping for, you might be excited or disappointed.

The site in question is Videocardz and it claims AMD announced the performance figures at a press briefing, to which it wasn't invited, but managed to scoop the details anyway. We already know a fair amount about RNDA 4 and the Radeon RX 9000-series, such as the number of compute units, VRAM amount, and rough clock speed figures.

However, translating all of that into actual gaming performance is difficult to do because we don't know what other changes AMD has implemented under the GPU hood. That will eventually become clear once the new cards fully launch but for now, we'll just have to trust that Videocardz really does have AMD's performance numbers.

Starting with the RX 9070 XT, it's purportedly 42% faster than a Radeon RX 7900 GRE (RDNA 3) and 51% faster than a RX 6900 XT (RDNA 2). That's at 4K, averaged across more than 30 games, using 'Ultra' quality settings. The latter is over four years old, so one should hope the RX 9070 XT is considerably better, but a 42% mean uplift over a 7900 GRE is not to be sniffed at.

In our review of a Sapphire RX 7900 GRE, we found that the RX 7900 XT was on average just 18% better at 4K, so if this 42% increase is genuine, it marks a substantial improvement for AMD. However, the devil is in the details and the horned one in question here is ray tracing.

Videocardz has separated AMD's claimed gaming figures into standard rendering and ray-traced rendering games, and in the case of the former, the average uplift is 37%—still impressive but not quite 42%. However, averaging the improvements in the games with ray tracing puts the RX 9070 XT at 53% better than the RX 7900 GRE.

The standard RX 9070 is quite a bit slower than the 9070 XT, with an average uplift of 21% against the 7900 GRE. That's half as good as the XT version and I find that to be puzzling, given that all the rumours we've had about the two card's specifications have pointed to them being separated purely by clock speeds.

Something clearly isn't right but exactly what's incorrect isn't known—either Videocardz's numbers are incorrect, the rumoured hardware specifications for the cards are wildly incorrect, or AMD's marketing figures have errors in them. All three scenarios could be true, as well.

One thing that really puzzles me is, if the RX 9070 XT really so much better than the 7900 GRE, why didn't AMD compare it to the 7900 XT—currently it's second most powerful gaming graphics card?

At least we don't have long to discover the truth of the matter, as the RX 9000-series is getting revealed at the end of this month, with retail sales starting in early March. One thing is certainly true, though: AMD likes to keep us guessing.

AMD's rollout of its upcoming graphics card has been weird. We expected to get all the details at CES, but were just left with teases. Then these cards were anticipated to launch around the time of the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 but pushed back to March. Now we are due to finally find out more about the AMD Radeon RX 9070 series and its fancy RDNA 4 architecture on February 28.

Set to air at 8 AM EST / 5 AM PT on the AMD Gaming YouTube channel, the RX 9070 live stream is going to give more information on the cards that are confirmed to launch in early March.

With the RTX 5070 Ti set to launch on February 20 and RTX 5070 launching on March 5, the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics cards will likely launch just after these two Nvidia cards.

These will be AMD's first graphics cards to use the RDNA 4 microarchitecture so there's quite a lot of hype and/or speculation surrounding them. Notably, these cards are reportedly targeting the more midrange market so won't be a replacement for that RTX 5090 card you've been looking for.

They could, however, sway you away from the cheaper 50-series cards if the live stream and subsequent launch suggest RDNA 4 has led to big performance gains.

In the wake of Nvidia's card selling out nearly instantaneously, AMD's David McAfee announced AMD is "planning to have a wide assortment of cards available globally for its launch in March."

We know surprisingly little about AMD's next set of graphics cards right now but a recent leak suggests the AMD RX 9070 XT can run the latest Monster Hunter Wilds benchmarking tool at 211.7 average fps, which is mighty impressive.

This is at 1080p with frame gen enabled but impressive nonetheless. If these stats bore out in real tests, and customers can actually get them on shelves, AMD could have a surprise hit on its hands.

I know I just hope the price is right to compete, and an FSR improvement wouldn't go amiss.

AMD wants to know what gamers are "most excited about in RDNA4." Which has got us thinking. What are we hoping for on PC Gamer? Nvidia is now so dominant, it certainly feels like a strong new generation of GPUs from AMD is more important now than ever.

So here are our thoughts on RDNA 4, is it our last great hope for affordable mid-range PC gaming?

Jeremy L, desiccated pixel peeper
As I've said before, for me pricing is critical. I explained my thinking on this last year, but the short version is that RDNA 4 needs to be priced right from the get go. AMD keeps pricing GPUs too high at launch, getting poor reviews as a result, only to then lower the price a few months later but not make an impact because the PR damage is done.

So, with all that in mind, what I want is a Radeon RX 9070 XT with raster performance up around an RTX 4080 or 5080 (they're near enough the same, after all) plus better RT than RDNA 3 and upscaling at least as good as DLSS 3 (I don't think it's realistic to ask for DLSS 4 quality) and all for $500 maximum. That's probably too much to ask, but it's what I think AMD needs to deliver to make an impact.

Jacob R, forever an optimist
Considering Nvidia's generation-to-generation improvement is likely to get slimmer as more affordable graphics cards in the series are released, AMD does have more of an opportunity to build something competitive with the RX 9070-series than some might think. That's essentially me hoping for some decent performance-per-dollar stats.

With plenty of VRAM and a competitive price, we might end up with something similar to the RX 7800 XT, or RX 7900 GRE, for value for money, which I'm wholly not opposed to. Heck, maybe even something better altogether. Knowing AMD, these cards will be a little too pricey at launch, but throw in some healthy discounts and a decent FSR 4 implementation, and either the RX 9700 XT or RX 9700 might be a sleeper, mid-range GPU to buy by the end of the year.

Wait, why am I hoping for discounts—Frank, get your darn prices right!

Andy E, hardware botherer
As a long-term FSR user, I'll take anything that can run an enhanced version with better image quality, thanks very much. FSR 3.1 might have made some decent improvements compared to previous iterations, but with the promise of machine learning thrown into the equation, part of me is excited for the potential of a proper DLSS equivalent in the form of FSR 4.

I'll be honest, though, I'm not all that hopeful. Nvidia seems so far ahead of the curve on this one, I doubt we'll be seeing anything quite as powerful as transformer models and Multi Frame Generation bundled with the new cards. Prove me wrong, AMD. You wouldn't be the first.

Dave J, jaded
Talking with both Frank Azor and David McAfee after the CES 2025 non-appearance of the RDNA 4 graphics cards was quite a sobering experience. It was all rather downbeat, as though they'd got wind of what Nvidia was going to do that evening when it announced an RTX 5070 with RTX 4090 performance for $549. Now, that was quickly exposed as just experiential gaming performance when Multi Frame Gen is supported, and not actually a $549 GPU with the rendering chops of an RTX 4090.

Still, it forced the RX 9070 off the table and into a delayed March launch. But cards were already in the hands of retailers and ready to go out to reviewers, but promises of optimisations and more information about FSR 4 abound.

What I want to see now is AMD be aggressive about its desires to really deliver on a gaming GPU for the 4K masses (in reality 4K as a resolution is actually dropping in prominence according to the latest Steam Hardware Survey). I want AMD to deliver against the efficiency promises it's made around the new architecture; it said it was being designed to be straightforward to manufacture and that means it should be available in high volumes and at a great price.

Given that a March release sees AMD able to get even more cards off the assembly line to add to the GPUs that were already in the channel for the missed January reveal, we ought to see a graphics card launch were you can actually buy the cards on offer.

But forget being competitive, let's put it at a price that makes it almost foolhardy to pick the relative Nvidia GPU—which will most likely be the RTX 5070 Ti. Give us that level of raw gaming performance for $499 and it will be hard to argue against.

But if AMD toes Nvidia's line again, pricing its cards a scant few dollars below the Nvidia competition, then again the GeForce feature set is going to come into play and sway many gamers with the promise of higher frame rates. However fake you might consider them to be.

James B, AMD GPU sceptic
I've not spent an extended amount of time with AMD graphics cards but I'd like the excuse to. The thing I'm looking for from RDNA 4 is good value. I don't necessarily want the best tech, and don't think the RX 9070 line is promising that. I just want a reason to not go for Nvidia's 50 line. Better FSR to compete with recent DLSS improvements and a boost to ray tracing would help. Competition in the GPU space is good and I'd like the chance to show that with my wallet.

Jacob F, cloud gazer
All I want from RDNA 4 is something to make me feel justified in splashing the cash on a graphics card again. I haven't had that since Nvidia's RTX 3060 Ti, which I'm still rocking today. It's kept up with all the games I like to play, but it's pushing it a bit, now, in this new RTX-by-default era.

What this means in practice is that I'd like RDNA 4 graphics cards to deliver cheap competition that beats midrange RTX 50-series cards in terms of pure raster performance. I don't even care massively about frame gen, although great frame gen performance would be a nice bonus.

50-series beating rasterisation pound-for-pound and great upscaling in the lower midrange segment—yep, that's about it. I might actually decide to upgrade this GPU generation if that happens.

Nick E, GPU sniffer
What I want from RDNA 4 is certainly not what I'll get, partly because it's not a realistic wish and partly because it's AMD. The fundamental architecture of RDNA 3 is absolutely fine—a good balance between out-right compute ability and gaming performance—but its biggest weakness has been the lack of dedicated hardware support for matrix/tensor operations, something that Intel offered right out of the bag with Alchemist (and Nvidia since Turing in 2018).

I know we're finally getting this in RDNA 4 but it's appearing late in the game, and this will be the first revision of the units in a gaming GPU. Historically, every time AMD has introduced something completely new to its graphics processors, it's either been a wild, left-field choice (HBM with Vega, chiplets with RDNA 3) that ultimately transpires to be an unnecessary move or it's been a stripped-down, simplified approach, such as hardware ray tracing in RDNA 2.

What I'd really like RDNA 4 to offer are compute units that don't have to rely on the driver compiler to correctly implement the dual-issue instructions, to make full use of all the available ALUs; I want to see dedicated hardware for accelerating BVH traversal, rather than doing it through compute shaders; I want to see matrix/tensor cores par with the competition. In short, I want an AMD card that offers the same feature set as Intel and Nvidia, but without a second-place performance.

I don't even care all that much about the price. AMD has been undercutting Nvidia for years but it hasn't made a jot to its share of the discrete GPU market, so if the RX 9070 XT costs $700, for example, then fine. Just as long as it's as good, or better, than the other $700 graphics cards one can buy.

Except it won't be, of course. For some absurd reason, the multi-billion dollar chip business still operates its graphics division like it's a struggling underdog, a plucky team of poor engineers trying their best against the evil behemoths that dominate the industry. RDNA 4 will end up being cheaper than Blackwell, offer the same traditional rendering performance (aka rasterization), but fall behind on features and cutting-edge technology/performance.

And once again, the Team Red faithful will cry 'Just you wait until RDNA 5 comes out, then you'll see!'

It's a wrap
So, there you have it folks. Our desperate hopes and dreams for RDNA 4. It's a popular riff that AMD never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity with its Radeon graphics, but there's something in my waters that tells me RDNA 4 is going to be different. It's not long now before we find out.

New GPUs selling out in picoseconds has depressingly become the norm. That includes, inevitably, Nvidia's latest RTX 50-series graphics cards. Maybe that's why when AMD yesterday asked gamers to say what they were most "excited" about for the upcoming RDNA 4 GPUs, "availability would be a brilliant start," pretty much sums up the sentiment.

Of course, that wasn't the only response to AMD's consumer and gaming rep, Frank Azor, when he posted, "What features are you most excited about in RDNA4?" on X. But the word "availability" does pop up rather a lot.

Pricing is another major theme AMD will need to address when the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT arrive in early March. "Don’t want to pay more for my GPU than I paid for my entire high end gaming rig a year ago," was the response from one X user and you get exactly where they're coming from.

Next, upscaling generally and more specifically and as one poster put it, "FSR 4 is a big one." FSR 4 will move AMD into the AI upscaling era, matching the approach Nvidia has been using ever since DLSS was first announced way back in 2018.

The slight snag is that just as AMD finally catches up in that broad regard, Nvidia has just made the jump from a CNN to transformer model for its upscaling, in some ways dramatically improving quality. Oh, and it has added Multi Frame Generation to DLSS, too. As ever, then, it feels like AMD is constantly playing catch up, always taking on Nvidia with a feature set that's a few years behind.

On the other hand, AMD can take solace from some of the response on X, many of whom said they just wanted solid raster performance at a great price. "All I want is much better 'real' frames per $," is a comment that probably sums up that line of posting.

Beyond that, one notable absence, relatively speaking, was mention of ray-tracing performance. It's not that nobody mentions it at all, but RT absolutely doesn't rank nearly as highly as availability, general performance, and FSR 4. That's interesting, isn't it?

Perhaps predictably, there's something of a chorus of "give us real frames, not fake frames" along with some posters suggesting that AMD needn't waste its time knocking up an answer to Nvidia's Multi Frame Generation.

MFG is just the latest in a long line of Nvidia technologies that have caused controversy. DLSS upscaling "arrived with a thud" according Nvidia itself, and MFG is splitting opinions, albeit some on PC Gamer are very much convinced.

Arguably the real problem with MFG is how Nvidia has presented it. Claiming that the new RTX 5070 is going to match the old RTX 4090, essentially on the basis of comparing the RTX 5070 running MFG to the 4090 running natively, is at minimum dubious marketing. As we now know, the raw performance of the 5080 can't match the 4090. So, the RTX 5070 will be a long way off.

Among other lesser concerns mentioned in the responses on X are performance per watt, plenty of VRAM, AI performance, driver quality, and video encode and decode features. But more than anything it's that trio of availability, price, and upscaling that seems to matter most. Well, it seems to for the first couple of hundred responses on X.

Jump on over to X if you dare and take a look for yourself. As for me, price is key. I said last year, RDNA 4 need to be priced extremely aggressively right from launch. AMD needs to avoid the mistake of pricing too high at launch, suffering poor reviews as a consequence, only to lower the price in fairly short order, but not make much impact because the PR damage has already been done.

With that in mind, I think a Radeon RX 9070 XT with near RTX 4080/5080 (let's be honest, they're virtually the same) raster performance for $500 maximum is what I want to see, plus a decent RT uplift and FSR 4 upscaling at least as good as DLSS 3. There's not long to wait...

You've perhaps seen our in-depth reviews of Nvidia's new RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 and decided that you're going to be better off spending your money on an RTX 40-series card instead. AMD's RDNA 4 cards won't be here for another month, too, so you've decided to go on the hunt for a nice RTX 4070 Super or an RX 7900 XT. However, if you stick with the major US retailers, you'll be served a whole load of nothing. Err, hello AMD and Nvidia? Where are all your graphics cards?

I've just spent the past two hours updating our GPU deals page, hunting through all the graphics cards listings at Amazon, Newegg, Best Buy, Walmart, and B&H Photo to find the best offers on AMD Radeon, Intel Arc, and Nvidia GeForce models. Rather than go into detail about every model I've searched for, let me just show you this simple summary:

• RTX 5090: Sold out (or overpriced)
• RTX 5080: Sold out (or overpriced)
  
  
• RTX 4090: Sold out (or overpriced)
• RTX 4080 Super: Sold out (or overpriced)
• RTX 4070 Ti Super: Sold out (or overpriced)
• RTX 4070 Super: Sold out (or overpriced)
• RTX 4070: Sold out (or overpriced)
• RTX 4060 Ti: $400 @ Amazon
• RTX 4060: $295 @ Newegg
  
  
• RX 7900 XTX: Sold out (or overpriced)
• RX 7900 XT: $730 @ Amazon
• RX 7900 GRE: Sold out (or overpriced)
• RX 7800 XT: $490 @ Amazon
• RX 7700 XT: $400 @ Amazon
• RX 7600: $260 @ Walmart
  
  
• Arc B580: Sold out (or overpriced)
• Arc B570: $230 @ Newegg

Yep, that's right. Almost the entire inventory of mid-range or higher-tier graphics cards is gone. There's zip out there, nothing, nyet, nada, nowt. Well, okay, there are some GPUs you can find, but they're either being sold at well over their MSRPs, or the retailers in question don't have confidence-inspiring reviews.

If I'm going to spend more than $500 on a graphics card, I want to be sure that the returns policy is as solid as steel and that I'll get my money back if I'm shipped a literal brick. The situation is not massively better here in the UK, though you can still get an RX 7900 XTX or an RTX 4080 Super at a below-MSRP price.

So, what on Earth is going on? Why is there such a dearth of graphics cards? The reason is simple(ish): AMD and Nvidia decided to wind down production of their 'last-gen' cards well before a wealth of new models could replace them. The sell-through rate of distribution centres and major retailers has been extraordinarily high, probably because they were expecting lots of new cards to arrive in January.

But, what we actually got was almost a paper launch with the RTX 50-series, with such few numbers of RTX 5090 and 5080 cards that retailers' shelves were bare within mere minutes of the products going on sale. In some cases, the shelves were empty before that point because they had already been sold. AMD, on the other hand, teased RDNA 4 before our eyes at CES but then took weeks before finally announcing that the cards themselves wouldn't be ready until early March.

Meanwhile, budget-savvy PC gamers took one look at the prices of the Blackwell cards, blinked a few times, and then ran off to snap up the remaining stocks of higher-tier RTX 40 cards. Want to grab an RTX 4070 variant? Tough luck, I'm afraid, but you can get the rather nice RX 7800 XT for a reasonable price. That's a GPU I regularly use for testing game performance and it's a real trooper of a mid-range graphics card.

The obvious question to ask at this point is, 'When will GPU stocks get better?' Unfortunately, nobody has a concrete answer to that query but I suspect it's not going to be for a while, with March being the very earliest. That's when we'll be able to get our hands on the Radeon RX 9070-series but if AMD and its partners can't meet demand, we're going to be right back to square on.

Nvidia's RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti are generally expected to be launched towards the end of February, but after the dearth of the 5080 cards on shelves (well, the dearth of sensibly priced 5080 cards), I'm not overly optimistic about 5070 stocks being good.

And don't look to Intel to save the day, as it can barely get enough Arc 580 cards out to meet demand, too. The slightly less potent B570 is available but that's a budget-tier card, though not budget enough compared to the similarly priced, but evidently superior Arc B580. Intel simply doesn't have anything to offer the mid-range/mainstream market and probably won't for a long time (if at all).

All of this means that whatever graphics card you currently have will have to suffice for a good while longer. I'd avoid going down the second-hand route if you have quite an old GPU and you're hoping to pick up a cheap RTX 30-series, for example, as prices have gone up due to the paucity of new models.

The truth of the matter is now that AMD and Nvidia make gazillions of dollars in the data centre market, gaming graphics cards are just hors d'oeuvres for the revenue sheets. Fancy new graphics architectures are good for headlines, but it's just not where the money is. Nice for the chip giants, rotten for PC gamers. Same as it ever was, I guess.

It's official, AMD's next-gen RDNA 4 gaming graphics cards will arrive in early March. And that's not a moment too soon given the latest figures from AMD's gaming graphics division. It's not pretty, folks!

The news comes from AMD's latest earnings call, laid on for the usual assembly of bankers and money men. Among various other revelations, including broadly strong financial results for AMD as a whole, CEO Lisa Su let slip that RDNA 4 is coming in early March.

"RDNA 4 delivers significantly better rate tracing performance and add 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," Su said.

Arguably, that's a little sooner than we were expecting. A few weeks ago, AMD's consumer CPU and GPU boss, David McAfee said that the new RDNA 4-based Radeon 9000 graphics cards "go on sale in March."

If anything, we took that to mean the end of March, given that whenever companies provide a rough launch window, the reality tends to be the end of that window. But not this time apparently. It seems the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT are just a month away.

Of course, new graphics cards from AMD can't come soon enough. AMD revealed that its Gaming Graphics division continues to nosedive. "Revenue declined 59% year-over-year to $563 million. Semi-custom [console chip] sales declined as expected as Microsoft and Sony focused on reducing channel inventory," Su said, adding, "in Gaming Graphics, revenue declined year-over-year, as we accelerated channel sellout in preparation for the launch of our next-gen Radeon 9000 series GPUs."

Now if that sounds bad, it is. But here's the thing. It looks even worse when you consider that AMD reported $922 million in revenue for Q1 of 2024 for the Gaming division. And that itself was 48% down year on year. In other words, revenues are shrinking and shrinking.

In fact, it's so bad that AMD has decided to not even bother separating out Gaming Graphics as a separate entity when it reports its results. "We plan to combine the client and the gaming segment into one single reportable segment to align with how we manage the business," AMD's CFO Jean Hu said on the call.

Anyway, there are lots of positive rumours regarding RDNA 4, some even suggest it could be close to Nvidia RTX 4080 and 5080 performance. But it will need to be absolutely stellar to turn around the fortunes of AMD's Gaming Graphics. And for our money, it'll be just that—money—that dictates how well the new RX 9070 and 9070 XT do.

As I said last year, those new GPUs need to be priced extremely aggressively to make a dent in Nvidia's dominant market share. As I said then, all too often AMD launches a new GPU or family of GPUs at prices that simply aren't appealing enough in terms of the performance and features comparison with Nvidia.

Duly, they fail to get any traction and eventually AMD drops prices to levels that would have made the cards really pretty interesting at launch. But by then, everyone has lost interest, Nvidia has acquired even more mindshare and the attention has shifted to next-gen GPUs. Rinse and repeat.

Except please let's not have a repeat. Please let's have RDNA 4 launch at a price that has us all gasping, but in a good way.

Eyes and ears might be turned towards Nvidia's impending RTX 50-series graphics cards right now, but don't forget that AMD's next-gen cards, the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, aren't far off, either. At least not in the grand scheme of things, but they're certainly further off than we originally expected. Now, AMD is giving us more information about why exactly that is.

According to AMD VP and GM David McAfee, the company is "taking a little extra time to optimize the software stack for maximum performance and enable more FSR 4 titles."

The Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT were expected to launch at CES 2025, but instead AMD didn't give a release date and revealed very few details about the new GPUs. We only got an RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT release date a couple of days ago when McAfee said they'll "go on sale in March".

Aside from speculation about possible changes of plans regarding the GPUs—switching from a chiplet to non-chiplet design—many have suspected that the main reason for the delayed launch was Nvidia's announcement of surprisingly cheap price tags for the upcoming RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti, which the AMD GPUs will almost certainly be competing against.

This reason, at least, is not speculation. AMD's Frank Azor confirmed as much to us at CES, saying the RTX 50-series announcement "went into our decision" to hold off on dishing out the deetz on the new desktop GPUs. Although, Azor clarified that it wasn't the only factor, saying "it isn't any one thing."

There are many reasons why such a thing could cause a delay, least of which being needing time to let the dust settle around the RTX 50-series cards and figure out a new price point. And if this meant reducing the price of the GPUs to better compete with the RTX 50-series, this could have caused problems with board partners that had already bought up a load of GPUs at the original higher price.

Now, however, Azor seems to be implying the delay is to do with getting "maximum performance" out of the cards. Of course, that's something we'd hope the company was aiming for anyway, but if it takes a little extra time to achieve, so be it.

And really, this new statement doesn't conflict with the old one. Improving performance and getting more FSR 4 titles up and running could be one of the "multitude of different things" Azor originally mentioned. Plus, of course, any improvements will help improve the AMD chips' value proposition against the 50-series chips.

So, it does track—could track, at least. But that doesn't detract from the fact that the RX 9070 and RX 9070 were delayed, which doesn't exactly scream confidence in the product. We won't know until we get our hands on the GPUs for testing. We were hoping that'd have been following CES, but alas, "maximum performance" calls.

Not a moment too soon, AMD has finally put a release date on the much anticipated Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT GPUs. They go on sale in March. Yeah, just March, no specific day in March has yet been indentified by AMD.

Still, cue much rejoicing from gamers after a high-value graphics card, right? We'll certainly be celebrating if the boards are as cheap and performant as the rumours suggest.

The news comes from the X account of AMD's consumer CPU and GPU boss, David McAfee, who said, "Radeon 9000 series hardware and software are looking great."

As we reported last week, these news RDNA 4-based GPUs didn't seem imminent following the launch that wasn't a launch at CES. What's more AMD's promise at the show that we'd see the 9070 and 9070 XT some time in Q1 allows for a launch right up to the end of March. So, it all makes sense.

Of course, it does all still beg the question of why not sooner? After all, AMD's previous generation of GPUs, the Radeon RX 7000 cards, were out right at the end of 2022. The company has already missed its usual two-year cadence for new GPU families.

There's no official answer to that question. But a number of factors are likely at play. First, there's a good chance that the GPUs that are about to launch weren't AMD's original plan for this generation.

AMD went for a chiplet design for RDNA 3 and the Radeon RX 7000 family and the expectation for RDNA 4 was a refinement of that approach. As we no know, AMD didn't go with chiplets for RDNA 4 and if that wasn't what was initially intended, then no doubt that put the whole proces behind schedule.

Then there was Nvidia's price bomb dropped at CES. Aside from the $2,000 RTX 5090, Nvidia's new graphics cards were cheaper than many observers expected. OK, at $549, the RTX 5070 still isn't exactly cheap for a mere '70 series model. But it may have been positioned lower than AMD was expecting.

If so, AMD may have needed some time to adjust. Which AMD's Frank Azor admitted to in our backstage chat at CES about the cards' non-appearance at the show. Perhaps that meant just reconsidering the positioning of the 9070 and 9070 XT. But it may also involve complications like rebates for board makers or other channel partners who signed up based on a different, higher pricing structure.

Or maybe March was the plan all along, though we do rather doubt that. AMD very much gave the impression at CES that it had pulled a full RDNA 4 reveal at the last moment.

Still, none of this will matter if the new cards are as good as the rumours. Ah, yes, those rumours. Allegedly, the 9070 XT's performance is about on par with an Nvidia RTX 4080, maybe a little faster for raster, maybe a little slower for ray tracing, but in that ball park.

Now, when you consider that the performance uplift of the new RTX 5080 looks modest, perhaps 15% or so going on Nvidia's own data and excluding 4x Frame Gen (and you really should exclude 4x Frame Gen from these kinds of broad performance comparisons), then it's apparent that AMD's new cards could be quite competitive.

If they also come in at the rumoured price levels, some of which have the 9070 XT at $480, then factor in AMD's much-improved ML-based FSR 4 upscaling, well, you have quite the proposition.

All of which will make the wait for March quite a long haul. There's quite a lot riding on this and expectations are now so high the risk of disappointment is obvious enough. But here's hoping RDNA 4 is every bit as good and every bit as cheap as all those rumours.

After a bit of an awkward silence moment during CES 2025 when AMD refused to divvy over RX 9070 / 9070 XT deetz, things might now finally be hotting up on the RDNA 4 front, as we're seeing plenty of stirrings regarding the upcoming GPUs. None of these stirrings are official, mind, but when there are enough leaks and rumours in the same vicinity, I tend to pay attention.

So, buckle up for a round-up of rumours, folks. Here we go: The RX 9070 has seemingly been shipped out and pictured by a Reddit user (via Wccftech) and the RX 9070 XT was apparently listed at a Danish retailer site (spotted by hardware leaker momomo_us) and at UK retailer site Overclockers (as spotted by Reddit user EmeraldPerson). These retailer listings have since been taken down.

You can also see some specs listed on Geizhals (via VideoCardz), a German tech comparison website.

What's particularly interesting about these sightings is that some of the listed specs match each other and also match those of another recent leak by momomo. In other words, there's enough corroboration across various leaks and retailer listings to take at least some of these specs seriously.

The ones that seem to have multiple sources of corroboration are the 9070 XT's CU count and and the GPU clock speeds. For the RX 9070 XT, it looks like we could be seeing a GPU with 64 CUs (Compute Units). For reference, the Radeon RX 7800 XT has 60 CUs and the RX 7900 XT has 84 CUs, so if these leaks are correct then the 9070 XT should sit somewhere between the two just in terms of the number of shader cores.

Where it might shoot ahead of both, though, is in the clock speed department. On this front, while they disagree over the RX 9070's boost clock, the Overclockers listing and momomo's familiarly unlabelled specification leak both point towards a similarly high RX 9070 XT boost clock of 2,970 MHz. That's a few hundred MHz higher than both the RX 7800 XT and RX 7900 XT.

There are some other specifications mixed into all this rumour slop, but these are the main things that have cross-corroboration. Which isn't to say that they'll end up being correct—we won't know for sure until we hear official word from AMD.

We do also have lots of cross-corroborated reports that the cards should feature 16 GB of VRAM. This is supported both from these new listings and also from a previous Asus TUF and TUF OC announcement that these cards should have "a supersized 16GB serving of VRAM". This announcement has since been removed, however.

You might notice that I've not spoken about any release date rumours, despite many of these listings and leaks pointing towards a January 22 reveal and January 24 release. That's because, based on what we know here at PC Gamer, this release window is very unlikely.

Which does suck, because I'd love to see what we're working with ASAP. If the more reasonable specification rumours are correct, then we could indeed be looking at cards that compete with the RTX 4070 Super and RTX 4070 Ti, which is where AMD seems to be positioning them.

Don't forget that these cards should also feature AMD's new and improved frame generation, plus improved ray tracing over previous-gen RDNA cards, too. 64 CUs on the RX 9070 XT, assuming architectural improvements, plus a much higher boost clock and 16 GB of VRAM, all seems very enticing if the price is right.

And that's the key, really. Pricing will likely make or break the RDNA 4 proposition.

Well, when it comes to next-gen GPUs, AMD's CES 2025 presentation let us know that the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT exist... and that's about it. Unfortunately, we didn't hear any mention of specs or pricing—no CU counts and no info about VRAM or bus widths.

However, Asus was the first to announce graphics cards featuring these RDNA 4 GPUs in the form of TUF OC and Prime OC variants, and what could have easily slipped under the radar is that these will have "a supersized 16GB serving of VRAM". In other words, the first confirmation of 16 GB of VRAM for the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT has come from Asus, not AMD.

We've suspected we'd be dealing with 16 GB of VRAM since at least mid-2024 with some RDNA 4 GPU specs and performance rumours. But as we said at the time, we couldn't trust those figures for certain, and AMD recently told us that "the performance data out there for RDNA 4 is completely inaccurate".

Nevertheless, the "16 GB of VRAM" part of previous rumours seems to have been correct. We don't know whether that'll be GDDR6 or GDDR7—though our money's on GDDR6—but the 16 GB pretty much says it'll be a 256-bit memory bus.

16 GB of VRAM will put the 9070/9070 XT in line with the Radeon RX 7800 XT, which makes sense given the 9070, if it weren't for AMD's naming scheme change-up, would be an RX 7800 XT. It also puts it in line with the newly announced RTX 5070 Ti and 5080, which will both have 16 GB of (GDDR7) VRAM.

It also puts the RX 9070 and 9070 XT ahead of the RTX 4070 Ti, which is the graphics card that has a level of performance it looks like AMD is pitting the new RDNA 4 cards against.

Of course, all of that's just comparing raw VRAM capacity, which says very little outside the context of memory bandwidth and general architecture. On that front, we're still just as starved for info as we were before, albeit with promises of improved ray tracing, AI compute, and so on.

We do know that these 9000-series graphics cards will be the only ones to support FSR 4, which promises "a dramatic improvement in terms of performance and quality". And if previous rumours are anything to go by (and remember, AMD seems to imply they're not) then we could be looking at 45% faster ray tracing performance than the 7900 XTX, too—this would be more in line with the RTX 4080 Super.

Whatever the case, AMD is explicitly focusing on mainstream price to performance, "aiming for a card that delivers outstanding performance where most gamers are buying their cards today." I'd say a 16 GB RTX 4070 Ti competitor would fit nicely into that category, provided the price is right. Let's hope AMD doesn't keep us waiting too long to share more.

AMD hasn't given us much information about the upcoming Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT this CES 2025, but that hasn't stopped Asus from giving us a peek at its own versions of the new graphics cards. The company has just announced its TUF Gaming OC and Prime OC versions of the next-gen AMD cards and probably the biggest change is how they approach cooling.

Instead of thermal paste on top of the GPU die, the TUF Gaming Radeon RX 9070 (XT and non-XT) OC and Prime Radeon RX 9070 (XT and non-XT) OC graphics cards will all feature a "phase-change thermal pad" that Asus says is "designed to give you reliable performance over the long term".

Asus explains: "The electrically non-conductive pad is a solid at room temperature but liquefies as it heats up. As it melts, it fills the microscopic gaps between the GPU and thermal module, providing superior thermal conductivity and enhanced heat dissipation, ensuring optimal performance, even for sustained, heavy GPU workloads.

"Additionally, the phase-change thermal pads offer exceptional longevity. They outlast traditional pastes by a significant margin, even for graphics cards that see heavy workloads on a regular basis. We can’t say that you’ll never want to repaste one of these graphics cards, but we are confident that it’ll be a long time before you even consider it."

The main reason to opt for a phase-change thermal pad instead of standard thermal paste, as Asus suggests, is because it can offer more longevity. This is because phase-change paste returns to a solid state at room temp, and this should prevent "pump out" in the long-term, which is when thermal paste squeezes away from the die centre over time, leading to increasing temperatures.

Our Nick uses a phase-change pad on his RTX 4080 Super for just that reason. You can see a picture of this below. The material being used to keep the thermals in check is Honeywell PTM7950, which has been shown to perform incredibly well.

The use of such thermal pads isn't completely new. XFX has used them for its Magnetic Air GPU models, for instance, such as on its Quicksilver AMD Radeon RX 7900GRE Magnetic Air.

It's new for Asus's TUF and Prime line-ups, though. And I do like how fitting it will be to have resilient thermal pads in the "TUF" cards. These cards, Asus reminds us, are armoured "in a metal exoskeleton for structural rigidity", have dual-ball fan bearings that "keep the fans spinning up to twice as long as conventional designs", and have "military-grade components for rock-solid power delivery and a long lifespan."

The Asus RX 9070 graphics cards themselves will feature 16 GB of VRAM and dual BIOS functionality to choose between a quieter or more performant mode. The Prime models "pack a triple-fan cooling solution into a compact 2.5-slot design".

I can't help but find it a little funny that 2.5-slot designs are now deemed "compact". But that's the world we live in now, I suppose: one of giant, powerful graphics cards. And given more power tends to mean more heat, I suppose this should make us extra grateful that manufacturers are looking to increase longevity by trying out new ways of keeping things cool.

Let's not get carried away with the "powerful" train of thought, though. Although we don't know for sure, it looks like these RDNA 4 GPUs might rival the RTX 4070 Ti—which is great, but nothing like the power that Nvidia's claiming of its latest high-end 50-series graphics cards. We'll have to wait and see.

AMD's David McAfee and Frank Azor have explained RDNA 4's absence from its CES press conference this year, and also spent a bit more time with us talking about its new "gamer-first" graphics card architecture. And that means making sure the cards are designed efficiently from both a performance-per-watt and manufacturing point of view.

"We've been working a lot in the architecture to drive efficiency," McAfee tells us backstage after the AMD keynote. "We know where gamers buy products; it's well below that $1,000 price point. And we are aiming for a card that delivers outstanding performance where most gamers are buying their cards today. And that's not $1,000 plus, that's well, well below that."

That's maybe a thinly veiled swipe at the expectedly expensive graphics cards rival Nvidia is thought to be announcing in its own CES keynote today. And that announcement is part of the reasoning behind RDNA 4 not getting its own announcement at the show, featuring only in a pre-briefing ahead of CES.

But this focus on efficiency is the number two priority for the RDNA 4 GPUs.

"So I would say number one priority is focusing on improving performance in the areas that gamers care about most," says McAfee. "And I think, I think in this generation, you'll see it as big ray racing improvements, big ML Ops improvements for things like FSR 4 and ML Super Resolution.

"I would say the second priority—that will be very clear when we show you more details about the product—is every part of the architecture is designed for efficiency. And efficiency is a really broad word. I'm not necessarily talking about performance per watt. I'm sure performance per watt is part of that, but it's also about making sure that the manufacturing process, the design decisions, like all of that, is incredibly cost optimized to deliver the best value to the end user."

These priorities are all about AMD's discrete graphics division trying to play to its strengths and build on the successes it had from the RX 7000-series of GPUs, and try and avoid its failures. Largely that's about creating more cards like the RX 7800 XT and RX 7900 GRE, in other words, cards in the volume, affordable segment of the market and not try can compete with Nvidia in the ultra-enthusiast arena.

This is a strategy AMD has used to some success in the past, and here it's specifically designed to try and improve on a dwindling share of the GPU market.

Frank Azor goes into some of AMD's thinking on this. "So the cliche thing is, 'oh, we listen to our customers.' I mean, that's what I don't want to come across and say, but we really did try to go to the drawing board on this and say, 'okay, how do we build a gamer-first, a customer-first type of card?'

"Because, you know, the opposite sometimes has been true. We've been doing what we think we need to do, and maybe we didn't listen as much to the market as we should have. And, you know, third time's charm... This is kind of the fourth time."

There are other things AMD is aiming to do with this generation, including making it easier to compare where its cards match up against the competition. This is the reasoning behind the new RX 9070 nomenclature, something requested by AMD's retail partners:

"Try to make it easier for them to be able to shop us versus the competition," says Azor, listing ways it's created the new RDNA 4 range. "Don't use ambiguity and confusion as a tool. Try to solve that, instead of using it and hoping that that's going to work in your favor. So we're really trying to listen to the feedback and apply it in this generation."

AMD is talking a good game so far, and if it can create a mass-market, affordable GPU that punches a little above its weight then it could have some meaningful impact on its market share. But it's still going to be a little while until we find out the full details.

In a cosy backstage chat, post-AMD CES keynote, David McAfee told us that everything you've heard about RDNA 4 performance is "completely inaccurate". McAfee and fellow AMD exec, Frank Azor were explaining the absence of either new RX 9070 or RX 9070 XT graphics cards from the keynote, fielding our questions about the new GPUs, new naming scheme, and AMD's priorities for this "gamer-first" new Navi 4 architecture.

Though McAfee's assertion about the inaccuracy of the rumoured RDNA 4 GPU performance could be a bit of a double-edged stabby thing. The last rumours we heard were suggesting a 45% uplift in ray tracing performance and rasterised frame rates on par with an RTX 4080 Super, which would be great. If it's more than that I'm going to be stunned and saddened if it's less.

"The performance data that's out there for RDNA 4 is completely inaccurate," says McAfee, before Azor chimes in: "The other thing I would tell you is nobody, nobody has the final drivers, so how can the data be accurate? Not even the card manufacturers have it."

So, as McAfee says, "don't trust everything you read on the internet." Except this. Cos, y'know, you can trust me.

But we will know all about the new architecture later in Q1, as Jack Huynh noted while quickly glossing over comments about RDNA 4 from Microsoft's Matt Booty in a video appearance in the keynote.

"We absolutely love the gaming community," says Huynh, "and we look forward to telling you more about RDNA 4 and FSR 4 later this quarter. Now let's shift gears to AI PCs…"

Yes, we were expecting to hear a bit more about AMD's upcoming RDNA 4 graphics cards at CES this year, and we did indeed get some deets out of a pre-briefing ahead of the show, but the new RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT were notable by their absence from the Jack Huynh's CES keynote.

The first thing to say is that AMD is keen to point out this is nothing to do with any manufacturing or development slip.

"RDNA 4 is absolutely on track from a development standpoint," McAfee tells us. "What we are seeing in the lab is right where we want it to be, hitting all of our performance and power expectations.

"This has nothing to do with bumps in the road and the development of this product, it's simply product timing and readiness to deliver the strongest performance punch that we can as we bring the product to market."

So, was it because of Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang taking to the CES stage later tonight to presumably unveil the new RTX 50-series Blackwell GPUs?

Azor fields this one: "There isn't any one single thing. 'Oh, we didn't bring RDNA 4 to the show because of the comp[etition].' it's a multitude of different things. Did that weigh into our decision? Yeah, of course it went into our decision. But it isn't any one thing. It's giving it the proper stage.

"It takes a long time to explain graphics properly. You have all the software elements, you have the ISV elements, you have the upscaling elements. We have to introduce you to the machine learning capabilities that RDNA 4 is going to have, which is going to take a little bit more time.

"So it's a lot of different factors, but I'm not going to tell you that that wasn't a factor that didn't weigh into our decision, of course, it did."

The new Navi 4 cards, the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, are different kinds of GPU to what Nvidia is expected to drop today, and AMD inevitably isn't going to want them swallowed up in all the hype surrounding new mega-powerful, mega-expensive GeForce cards, or compared with them.

RDNA 4, whether by design or necessity, is more about targeting an efficient graphics card release, from both a perf-per-watt perspective as well as a pricing one. As Azor tells us, it's about building "a gamer-first, consumer-first type of card."

But we probably won't have to wait long to see RDNA 4 get its time in the sun, and if the reaction around Intel's B580 card is anything to go by, people are very keen on new, affordable GPUs. Who knew, eh?

Well, it's finally here. We've been crossing our fingers for a long, long time waiting for AMD Strix Halo, and now the waiting's over. As one of its many rabbit hat-pulls for CES 2025, AMD's just announced the halo (ie, top) end of its Strix Point mobile processors, combining Zen 5 CPU cores, RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics, and an NPU.

These new "halo" processors are the Ryzen AI Max 385, AI Max 390, and AI Max+ 395. (Oh, and the AI Max 380, but that's a Pro-only, ie, business-focused, processor.) These will be available Q1-Q2 2025.

We've suspected a Strix Halo launch for a while now, and we'd heard about its AI Max naming and possible specs since September last year. As it turns out, those previously rumoured specs were almost entirely accurate. The only difference is that now we know the Ryzen AI Max 390 will have just 32 CUs, not 40 as the previous rumour had it. That number of CUs is the privilege of the top-end Max+ 395 alone.

Here's the full range of specs:

If you're wondering just how powerful those 40 RDNA 3.5 CUs on the AI Max+ 395 will be, bear in mind the Z1 Extreme found in the Asus ROG Ally X and a couple of other handhelds has just 12 RDNA 3 CUs, which are very similar in architecture. Even in the AI Max 385 and 390, you're getting close to three times the graphics capabilities of such handhelds.

But these AI Max chips probably won't be for handhelds—what use would a handheld have for so many CPU cores plus an NPU? Instead, AMD is explicitly targeting these chips at the laptop market, especially for creative and AI workloads.

This is in part thanks to its "unified coherent memory architecture" which allows up to 96 GB of memory to be dedicated to graphics, with a bandwidth of 256 GB/s. Such bandwidth, AMD says, is "unprecedented in any x86 mobile device". Ultimately, all of this combined with the NPU means AI Max chips can run large AI workloads with "performance faster than high-end desktop graphics cards".

AMD backs up these claims with its own graphs—which we should, of course, take with a pinch of salt. Comparing the top-end AI Max+ 395 to the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V, AMD claims 1.4x faster graphics performance and 2.6x faster rendering (including a whopping 402% faster performance in Blender Classroom). And it even seems to trade blows with, or beat, Apple M4 chips for rendering.

We can obviously expect good things for gaming, too, compared to other systems with integrated graphics. For context, we found the 16-CU 890M to have modern games playable at 1080p, and these new AI Max processors will have at least double the CUs of that mobile GPU.

That's why I certainly take the AMD representative seriously when they say it is "simply the most advanced mobile x86 processor ever created". The only question is price and target market.

I don't, unfortunately, see these AI Max chips being the best options for gaming. They'll be a dab hand at gaming, for sure, but they'll surely be expensive given their overall feature set that will be beneficial for creative professionals and graphics/AI developers.

In which case, I'd suspect we'd get more gaming bang for our buck from gaming laptops with dedicated mobile GPUs in them. Then again, Strix Point is lower power than a fully fledged gaming chip and GPU combo, so maybe the battery life will justify the likely premium cost. We'll have to wait and see.

CES 2025 is officially underway, and the first of our big GPU hitters has broken ranks. Sort of. AMD's RDNA 4 graphics cards have long been anticipated, and now we've been given a preview of what to expect from the next-generation AMD GPUs. In a pre-briefing at least, as AMD didn't actually show us anything regarding the new GPUs at the keynote itself.

Built on a 4nm process, the RDNA 4 architecture features second-generation Gen AI accelerators, third-gen Raytracing accelerators, and a second-generation AMD Radiance Display engine, with optimised compute units, "supercharged" AI compute, and improved ray tracing per CU.

AMD is also promising better media encoding and decoding image quality and plans to introduce FSR 4 alongside the new architecture.

Unlike previous iterations, FSR 4 will be machine learning-powered, which hopefully will bring it closer to parity with Nvidia's AI-based DLSS. AMD says the FSR 4 upgrade feature will only be available on AMD Radeon RX 9070-series cards for supported games with AMD FSR 3.1 already integrated.

So, it looks like that improved AI compute will be necessary to power the latest version of AMD's upscaling tech, as AMD has also promised a "significant boost in AI" for the new cards.

The announcement was very light on details, so we're still not sure exactly how many compute units will be on offer for each GPU, how much VRAM will be provided, or what bus width the new cards will be using... really, not much technical detail at all beyond the existence of RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 models.

So, a bit less than I was personally expecting, at the very least. Still, there's info to be gleaned here, including that the new cards will be available in Q1 of this year. With the next-generation Nvidia RTX 50-series cards expected to be announced later this evening, many will be hoping for AMD to provide some robust competition in the mid-range market for the new cards.

As for the high-end, however, that game was over before it really started. AMD's Jack Huyhn has already stated that the next-gen Radeon cards won't be targeting the top-end of the market, so really it looks like a potential RTX 5070 would be the card to beat for the RX 9070 XT moving forward.

And will it? Who knows. With details still thin on the ground, it's difficult to judge what the potential performance might be at this stage—and that's always a guessing game until we test the cards for ourselves.

Regardless, it looks like it'll be a little while longer before we get some cold hard data on exactly what sort of specs to expect from these cards, although hopefully, it won't be too long before we slam them into our benchmarking rigs for a thorough test session. In the meantime, this is what we've got. It's not a lot, but at least RDNA 4 is well on its way, ey?

As part of the AMD announcement today at CES 2025, AMD has taken the lid off the latest version of its upscaling tech, FSR 4. Non-Nvidia GPU users have long lusted after an upscaler that can compete with DLSS, and according to AMD, there are significant improvements here that may do just that.

The bad news? You'll need one of those fancy new RDNA 4 cards to take advantage of it. AMD says that FSR 4 was "developed for RDNA 4 and the unique compute aspects of the RDNA 4 AI accelerators", which means that this new machine learning-powered solution will need an RX 9070 XT or RX 9070 to power all the AI gubbins.

My RX 7800 XT weeps. Anyway, AMD also says that FSR delivers "very high quality 4K upscaling with a dramatic improvement in terms of performance and quality compared to prior generations."

It's interesting that performance is touted as one of the great improvements to FSR 4 over the previous version, as my FSR 3.1 testing shows that AMD's most recent upscaler release can, in most scenarios, keep up with DLSS 3 in the framerate stakes—and sometimes even slightly surpass it.

As my comparison with Nvidia's efforts demonstrates, however, FSR's image quality still lags far behind DLSS on anything but Quality settings—so here's hoping the machine learning improvements in the new version equate to less fizzy, grainy images, particularly at Performance setting levels.

With the Nvidia announcement due to take place later today, part of me wonders whether the performance improvement claims are in anticipation of extra juice found in DLSS 4, if it's announced this evening. Still, speed and image quality gains are what I was hoping for out of the next version of FSR 4, and AMD says it can provide.

It also claims that FSR 4 can deliver "very low latency gaming" in combination with AMD Anti Lag 2, an existing tech designed to minimise latency from input to presented image on GPU-bound games.

The real issue, to me at least, is adoption. FSR 3 suffered from relatively slow developer uptake on release—and while it looks like FSR 4 might simply be a bolt-on upgrade for games that already feature FSR 3.1, devs will want to see the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 selling well if they're going to prioritise FSR 4 integration into games alongside DLSS.

With Nvidia's RTX 50-series cards presumed to be waiting in the wings for their debut (and possibly a DLSS 4 announcement), we may have another upscaler showdown on our hands. As AMD is only releasing cards in the mid-range this generation, it'll likely be hoping that FSR 4 can be the great equaliser to tempt would-be-buyers away from higher-end Nvidia offerings, of which it has no competition.

That's all dependent on the pricing of the new Radeon cards, at least. Anyway, FSR 4. It's coming, AMD says it's better, and you'll need some new silicon to run it. Things are heating up, folks.

The world awaits the arrival of next-generation graphics cards, and all eyes are now turning towards CES 2025 where it's hoped that Nvidia and AMD will show off some shiny new GPUs. Until now the latter's offerings have been assumed to be the RX 8000-series, but several leakers are now saying they'll fly in under the RX 9000-series moniker. And keep your fork, because there's more—we may have already had a sneak peek of what a new Radeon GPU might look like.

X user momomo_us posted a screenshot of what looks to be retailer GPU listings, and sitting almost at the tippy top are two GPUs called the RX 9070 and the RX 9070 XT (via Tom's Hardware). Both new GPUs sit above AMD's current fastest graphics card in the listing, the RX 7900 XTX.

This new X0X0 naming convention seems to be confirmed by fellow leaker All The Watts!, who's posted a list of card groupings from the RX 9070-series down to the RX 8040-series.

And wouldn't you know it, there's a third. According to X user and known leaker HXL, the 8000-series nomenclature refers to RDNA 3.5 GPUs like Strix Halo, while the 9000-series naming scheme is supposedly for fully-fledged RDNA 4 GPUs.

All three leakers posted this new info within an hour of each other, so that could mean it's all a big game of telephone—or that they're all relying on the same leaked info at once.

The past three generations of desktop AMD cards have been known as the RX 5000, RX 6000, and RX 7000-series respectively, with the second digit used as the primary model differentiator. So this new skip-a-digit system would be a break from recent tradition, although it'd make a lot of sense.

AMD's latest Zen 5 CPUs are also called the 9000-series, although they use second digit identifiers like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Lining up the latest AMD GPUs and CPUs with a 9000 number each makes things relatively neat and tidy at least, with the change in identifier number hopefully meaning we don't have to break out a decoder wheel, as has been provided by AMD in the past.

Not only that, but it looks like an eagle-eyed redditor may have spotted images of at least one of these new cards displayed prominently in a recent advertising banner:

Are these reference 8000 series card? from r/Amd

Reddit user SubtleSerenity spotted a black and silver cooler design in several AMD ads on the platform, which looks distinctly different from AMD reference card designs previous. Hoang Anh Phu, another trusted AMD leaker, has since stated that they believe the card to be the RX 9070 XT—although as with all leak confirmations, pinches of salt all round are probably still a good idea.

Not that there's anything particularly exciting or revolutionary about what looks like a standard three-fan cooler design, but it still seems that AMD's marketing department may have let an ad loose too early. The card is shown in conjunction with a Ryzen 9 CPU, so the image has possibly been made for use with bundle deals yet to come.

With rumours abound that the top RDNA 4 card may be 45% faster in ray tracing than the RX 7900 XTX (and deliver raster performance equivalent to an RTX 4080), what we're now assuming is the RX 9070 XT might be a bit of a killer card. It's still not likely to compete with anything at the top of Nvidia's next-generation graphics cards, as AMD's Jack Huyhn has already stated it's not aiming for the high-end market with the new generation of GPUs.

Still, at the right price? It could still be a great card if these numbers prove out, and perhaps FSR 4 might even the playing field a bit more now it's rumoured to be getting a dose of AI, like Nvidia's DLSS. Still, it's all speculation for now, so we'll have to wait until CES 2025 to officially find out.

The GPU in the hot new PlayStation 5 Pro is mostly pretty old tech. But it does preview the ray-tracing upgrades that are coming with AMD's new RDNA 4 graphics chips for PC gamers.

That's the low down from the same PS5 Pro deep dive that also revealed Sony went its own way with AI hardware in the console rather than using AMD technology.

Sony's lead architect for its PlayStation consoles, Mark Cerny, has explained that the GPU in the PS5 Pro is still RDNA 2-based at its core, just like the original PS5. The reason for that is straightforward, compatibility.

By largely carrying over RDNA 2 technology for the shaders in the PS5 Pro's GPU, game developers can compile a single code path and have it run on both the PS5 and the PS5 Pro.

However, the PS5 Pro is not identical. "The base technology for PS5 Pro is somewhere between RDNA 2 and RDNA 3," Cerny says. For starters, while the shaders are RDNA 2, parts of the geometry pipeline are from RDNA 3.

Those geometry pipeline elements are faster but essentially invisible to a game engine. You can use the same code on both consoles, it will simply run better on the PS5 Pro.

However, had Sony gone for, say, the doubled-up floating point math capability from RDNA 3, that would require two code paths to be compiled, one for PS5 and one for PS5 Pro. That wasn't a burden Sony wanted to put onto game devs for what is a mid-life refresh rather than a properly new console generation.

But from a PC gaming perspective, easily the most intriguing aspect of the PS5 Pro's GPU involves ray tracing. Cerny says the upgraded ray-tracing hardware is sourced from a "future RDNA" generation.

Cerny is non-specific, but he is clear that this technology is "showing up first" in the PS5 Pro and is not currently available in any other AMD chip. Given we're expecting RDNA 4 to be replaced by an architecture-branded CDNA, that really only leaves RDNA 4.

Whatever, Cerny goes into some detail regarding the upgrades. You can watch the video for the full details. But the short version involves doubling up the BVH performance and adding new stack management hardware.

The BVH performance boost gives broad-based improvements in ray-tracing performance, while the new stack management engine particularly helps with complex reflections.

So what impact does that have on performance? "It's difficult to quote an exact speed up because it's very dependent on specifics of usage. But we commonly see the calculation of the rays occurring at double or triple the speed of Playstation 5," Cerny says.

However, that performance boost includes the simple impact of having a 67% larger and more complex GPU in PS5 Pro versus PS5. Cerny reckons that alone tends to translate into a real-world performance boost of around 45%.

So, bearing in mind Sony is claiming ray tracing is typically around 100% to 200% faster on the PS5 Pro, it's clear that the bulk of that improvement is architectural rather than simply a consequence of adding 67% more functional units.

That bodes pretty well for RDNA 4 GPUs. Currently, AMD has comfortably the weakest Ray-tracing performance of the three main GPU vendors for the PC.

Intel's new B580 GPU has pretty decent ray tracing throughput, but it's Nvidia that's in the lead. Based on the improved ray tracing in the PS5 Pro, we'd expect AMD to close most if perhaps not all of the gap to Nvidia.

Of course, Nvidia will have its own new GPU architecture arriving early in the new year alongside AMD's RDNA 4. Known as Blackwell and likely to be branded RTX 50 series, it will no doubt bring its own ray tracing boost. Odds are, then, that AMD will remain at a clear disadvantage.

But hopefully, RDNA 4's ray tracing will have improved sufficiently to make it more usable than that of existing RDNA 2 and RDNA graphics cards for the PC, where enabling high-quality ray tracing in games like Cyberpunk 2077 can really hammer frame rates. Watch this space...

We've been writing about Strix Halo for so long, without actually seeing any working hardware, that you'd be forgiven for believing that it's just vapourware. But with the first appearance of AMD's flagship laptop APU in the Geekbench database, we finally have some numbers to pore over. And a decidedly cumbersome name.

The moniker in question is the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395 w/ Radeon 8060S, though the model's actual name doesn't have the Radeon part. But even so, saying 'I have a Ryzen AI Max+ Pro' before you even get to the specific version is hardly silky smooth marketing.

There's a good reason why desktop CPUs are just Ryzen 5 or Core i7, and this just feels like AMD's marketing division has been let loose with a box of crayons and a colouring book. I kid; it's clearly worked very hard to come up with the name.

Anyway, we already knew about AMD's clunky nomenclature and the name is ultimately irrelevant when compared to the fact that this is an APU with one heck of a CPU and GPU combination. Sporting two Zen 5 CCD chiplets for 16 cores, 32 threads, and 32 MB of L3 cache, the CPU side of things is going to be seriously potent. Not quite as good as a desktop equivalent, due to having half the amount of L3 cache (if the Geekbench info is correct), but still very nice indeed.

But it's the GPU that's the star of the show. RDNA 3.5 architecture, 40 compute units, and a 256-bit memory bus. That's not just massively better than any current laptop or handheld gaming PC APU—we're talking console-levels of performance here.

Well, potentially. We still don't know how well it'll run games, of course, but we now have a bit of insight into its compute performance, thanks to Geekbench (and BenchLeaks on X).

Someone has uploaded a score for the benchmark tool's Vulkan GPU compute test and the figure of 67,004 is not to be sniffed at. For example, this RTX 4060 laptop in the database achieved a score of 64,587 so purely based on my utterly unscientific sample of one, Strix Halo's GPU is better than an RTX 4060 (direct comparison).

Of course, that's a silly claim to be making, because one could spend a while browsing through the database (longer than necessary, given the lack of filters…) and eventually find an RTX 4060 result that's much better.

Geekbench doesn't show important values such as GPU clock speeds, power settings, or driver version. And it's purely a synthetic compute test, using Vulkan.

The computer's name in the Strix Halo result, "AMD MAPLE-STXH", strongly suggests that this is an engineering sample, so it's likely to be running with lower-than-retail clock speeds and a power setting that's aimed at stability, rather than performance.

One Geekbench result doesn't make for a mighty APU, no matter how good the score is, but I should imagine that this will be the start of a flood of entries, and over the coming weeks we'll get a better view of how Strix Halo is going to be.

The Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395 is going to be very expensive but I can't wait to see just how good it is at gaming. Let's just hope that there's some monstrous performance to match that monster of a name.

If there's one area where AMD's graphics cards need to improve, it's ray tracing. Now the latest rumour suggests a big boost in ray tracing performance is exactly what AMD's next gen RDNA 4 GPUs are going to get.

More specifically, it's claimed by well-established Chiphell forum user zhangzhonghao (via Sweclockers) that the upcoming Radeon RX 8800 XT will deliver no less than 45% better ray tracing performance than the existing Radeon RX 7900 XTX. If true, that is a monumental improvement in AMD's weakest metric.

Arguably, the critical point to note here is that the 8800 XT (if that is indeed what AMD brands it) will not be positioned at the high end. AMD is on record that it isn't going after the very top tier of graphics card with RDNA 4. But these rumours claim that it will nevertheless offer far more ray-tracing grunt than its current top-end GPU.

That would imply a truly massive ray-tracing boost versus, say, the existing Radeon RX 7800 XT, which is likely to be more aligned with the new GPU in terms of market positioning towards the upper end of the mid range.

The same rumour claims that the 8800 XT will offer raster performance more or less in line with an RTX 4080 or 4080 Super. If the 8800 XT offers all of that and is indeed positioned anywhere near the 7800 XT, which can currently be had for $450 or so, it will be just about the most compelling new GPU in living memory.

To be frank, it all sounds too good to be true. The most obvious element that could spoil the party, even if the performance estimates are bang on, is pricing. If AMD really does have something that good on its hands, what are the odds it prices the thing up at $600, $700, maybe even $800?

As ever, all of this falls into the wait-and-see category. AMD does have form when it comes to undercutting Nvidia massively. Way back in the mists of 2008, AMD rolled out the Radeon HD 4870 that offered 80% of the performance of Nvidia's top-end GPU for barely more than half its price.

Could we be set to see something like that again? I slightly doubt it, but I'm still hopeful. And if it happens, I'm buying six of the things to show my appreciation. Maybe.

AMD hasn't even got its next-gen RDNA 4 gaming GPUs out the door, but already there are rumours RDNA 5 has been cancelled in favour of the "unified" UDNA graphics architecture. If true, the move could be all about adding AI capabilities to AMD's gaming GPUs as soon as possible.

AMD's current gaming graphics cards are based on the RDNA 3 architecture, while its enterprise, datacenter and AI GPUs are based on the CDNA technology. The idea is that the demands of gaming and data centers are sufficiently divergent to merit separate architectures.

At least, that was the narrative until September, when AMD announced plans to unify RDNA and CDNA into a single "UDNA" architecture. At the time, AMD said the new approach would be much easier for developers, though that implies that there are software developers creating games and, say, large language models at the same time, which seems unlikely.

Whatever the merits of the new approach, expectations in September were that UDNA would probably take a little while to hit gaming PCs. RDNA 4 is coming early in the new year and much had already been rumoured about its supposed but as yet unofficial successor, RDNA 5.

So, the assumption was that gaming graphics would make the jump to UDNA after RDNA 5. But no, not according to the latest rumour on Chiphell (via PC Guide). Established leaker zhangzhonghao claims that RDNA 5 is toast and that AMD is readying a UDNA-derived family of GPUs to succeed RDNA 4.

What's more, the poster says that UDNA will actually be GCN derived. Say what? GCN is the AMD graphics architecture that preceded RDNA and first appeared in 2012 in the Radeon HD 7000 family of GPUs. But GCN did not, in fact, die with the release of RDNA in 2019. Instead, it forked off into CDNA. So, if you can forgive all the acronyms, the idea is that UDNA is a development of CDNA, which in turn has its origins in GCN.

Now, it's worth pointing out that the notion of "unified" graphics architectures isn't quite what it first seems. It doesn't mean that AMD will be selling the same chips to gamers as AI developers.

There's lots of stuff related to the rendering pipeline and video output in a gaming GPU that doesn't go into an AI GPU, including raster and geometry hardware, render output, 2D engines, hardware video encode and decode, and so on.

What were really talking about is a shared architecture for the shader ALUs and the AI-accelerating matrix cores that Nvidia calls Tensor cores and are the cores found in various NPU or neural processing units. That's quite a lot for even a gaming GPU these days, what with the shaders being so important, of course. But it's by no means the whole chip.

Anyway, while a move to a "new" architecture that's based on the "old" GCN technology superficially seems like a retrograde step, once again it's hard to draw too many conclusions. The relationship to GCN may be more of a high-level philosophical approach than carrying over the nuts and bolts of the GCN architecture circa 2012.

Moreover, at this stage it's really impossible to say for sure what the pros and cons of AMD's new unified approach will be for gamers. However, perhaps the most obvious upside will be added AI smarts.

Right now, AMD doesn't use any AI acceleration in its graphics cards to process or enhance its FSR upscaling tech. That's quite a contrast with Nvidia, which leans into AI heavily with DLSS and bigs up the contribution of the Tensor cores built into the last three generations of Nvidia gaming GPUs.

Indeed, current RDNA 3 GPUs do not have matrix cores at all. But CNDA GPUs do, and UDNA GPUs surely will, too. In other words, UDNA gaming GPUs will be entering the AI age at last. There have been big hints that AMD's FSR is going to start matching up with Nvidia when it comes to using dedicated silicon to effect its upscaling and frame generation features, which means future GPUs will need to feature tech the current ones really don't. And, when you think of it in those terms, maybe AMD needed to move to UDNA ASAP, after all.

It's hard to believe that 2025 is only two months away now but with lots of new gaming PC stuff scheduled for release next year, it's two months too long. If you were hoping for AMD to bring some of its desktop CPU magic to laptops, though, you might be disappointed to see that current plans point to a lot of refreshes and rebrands of current APUs. But countering them will be some seriously great gaming chips.

According to Wccftech, citing a now-removed video from Weibo user Golden Pig Upgrade Pack, the current Ryzen AI 300 series will still consist of Strix Point APUs—a CPU with up to four Zen 5 and eight Zen 5c cores, and a GPU with 16 RDNA 3.5 compute units (CUs). However, they will be joined by a new chip, Kraken Point, that has all the hallmarks of being a partially disabled Strix Point processor. That's because it just seems to have four fewer Zen 5c cores and CUs.

Even the new Ryzen AI 200 series of chips are just rebranded Hawk Point Ryzen 8040-series processors, with eight Zen 4 cores and 12 RDNA 3 CUs. But it's not all gloomy news, as AMD is planning on making laptop versions of its Ryzen 9000-series chips under the codename of Fire Range, including 3D V-Cache variants.

Just like the current Dragon Range, these will use the same chiplets as their desktop equivalents, just in a smaller package (and presumably with lower clocks and power limits). The Ryzen 9 7945HX is one heck of a gaming laptop CPU (as used in the Asus ROG Scar 17) so the Zen 5 version should be at least as good.

The real stars of the laptop show, however, will be the Strix Halo chips, though, aka Ryzen AI Max. We've covered leaks about the chips before but the specs are still worth mentioning again, especially in light of how disappointing the other 'new' APUs seem to be. The range will start with the lowly Ryzen AI Max Pro 380, with six Zen 5 cores and 16 RDNA 3.5 CUs. At the other end of the scale is the AI Max+ 395, with 16 Zen 5 cores and 40 (yes, 40!) RDNA 3.5 CUs.

However, the video does add some additional information. Rather than extend the current naming scheme for integrated graphics in laptops (e.g. Radeon 780M and Radeon 890M), AMD will use Radeon 8060S and 8050S for 40 and 32 CU iGPU variations.

I understand why AMD felt the need to have a notably different name with these new graphics chips (the performance difference between a 780M and an 8050S will be huge, thanks in no small part to the 256-bit memory bus), but it's just more confusion in AMD's evermore complex nomenclature.

In that same video, there's news about the next generation of discrete laptop GPUs from AMD, too. X user Everest (via Igor's Lab) managed to grab a screenshot of a slide, before the video was taken down, that shows the current RX 7000M variants all being swapped for one of four 'R25M' chips, although there's not an awful lot of information.

They will be (or should that say, hopefully be?) RDNA 4 GPUs and the lowest spec one will come with 8 GB of VRAM, on a 128-bit memory bus, with a 50 to 130 W power budget. I know that doesn't sound spectacular but Nvidia's lowest model laptop GPU is the RTX 4050, which just has 6 GB on a 96-bit memory bus.

Higher-end laptops will be served by an R25M variant sporting 16 GB of VRAM, a 256-bit memory bus, and up to 175 W of power. Without any words on the CU count and clock speeds, though, the details don't tell us anything about performance. That said, I'd be surprised if they were lower than their equivalent RX 7000M models.

All of this will be for nought if AMD can't get laptop vendors to use its chips, though. If one browses through Newegg's new laptop offers, discounting third-party sellers, around 50 models are sporting Intel CPUs and Nvidia RTX GPUs.

Searching again but this time for those with AMD CPUs shows just 11 models and only one of those has an AMD discrete laptop GPU. It's a far better picture if one searches from any seller but trying to find one that houses a Radeon RX 7900M, for example, is a frustrating affair.

AMD has the goods for 2025, even if some of the new chips are just rehashes of older ones, now we just need more gaming laptop manufacturers to use them.

Sony's new PlayStation 5 Pro doesn't officially launch for another two days but lots of lucky buyers have managed to get their hands on one already. A tech YouTuber teardown and the console's manual reveal that the PS5 Pro has a larger internal SSD, extra RAM for the operating system, and a GPU that isn't quite what all the rumours suggested it would be.

The teardown in question was done by Brazilian YouTube channel TAG, which pulled apart a brand new PS5 Pro just so we could all see what's new on the inside. Digital Foundry also got hold of an early shipment but was somewhat less keen on breaking out the screwdrivers, or at least, not just yet.

It turns out that the Pro isn't as big as the initial images suggested it would be. A little taller than the original PS5 and around 500 g (18 ounces) heavier, but nowhere near as bulbous as the first iteration.

The teardown video and manual also confirm the new console gets a larger internal SSD—2 TB in raw capacity, although a chunk of that is "reserved for use in connection with console administration, maintenance and additional options."

And there's more RAM, too, though not the fast GDDR6 stuff that's used by the processor. There's still just 16 GB of that and while we don't know what it's clocked to, we do know that more of it will be accessible to games because Sony's added 2 GB of DDR5 to the motherboard, to be used by the console's operating system.

The most interesting aspect of the PS5 Pro is the new APU that powers the whole thing. It's another AMD semi-custom APU, with eight Zen 2 CPU cores and 16 threads, plus a 'Radeon RDNA' GPU. It's the latter that's the biggest surprise to me because for a good while now, all of the rumours have pointed to it being an RDNA 3-based chip.

In the PS5 Pro announcement, Sony stated that the new GPU had 67% more compute units than that in the original. The original PS5 graphics processor is RDNA 2-based with 36 compute units and a peak FP32 throughput of 10.3 TFLOPs.

So, the Pro's manual confirms two things: (1) the PS5 Pro GPU has 60 compute units and (2) it's clocked lower than the first PS5, probably around 2,175 MHz (vs 2,233 MHz).

But what none of this actually tells us is whether it's really RDNA 3 instead or still just RDNA 2. My initial feeling is that it is the former because Sony has promoted the PS5 Pro's upgraded ray tracing capabilities as being a big step forward for the console, and some of the internal changes in the RDNA 3 are there to improve ray tracing.

However, a 60 compute unit RDNA 3 GPU, running at 2,175 MHz, should have a peak FP32 output of 33.4 TFLOPS, because there are double the number of ALUs per compute unit than in RDNA 2. That might make one believe that it's not RDNA 3 inside but it's worth noting that the 'double' FP32 performance only comes about if the drivers use a specific instruction.

Without it, an RDNA 3 GPU is no different to an RDNA 2 one. Given that the drivers for the PS5 Pro are unique to that system, it's perfectly possible that Sony requested that AMD remove the instruction from the driver's compiler.

One reason for this is that driver compilers aren't especially sophisticated and getting them to figure out when is best to use a specific instruction is really hard, unless one goes in and 'hand tunes' the shader code afterwards.

By removing the so-called 'dual issue' instruction, there's less scope for the compiler to mess things up, although it doesn't ever seem to be a problem on PCs using RDNA 3 graphics cards.

From the GPU traces I've run on games with RX 7000-series cards, the dual-issue instruction rarely crops up. But this doesn't mean the extra ALUs aren't used, though. When running pixel shaders, RDNA 3 GPUs can issue normal instructions to all of them in a compute unit, in just one cycle, compared to two cycles with RDNA 2 chips.

So having thought about all of this, I'm still leaning toward it being an RDNA 3 processor in the PlayStation 5 Pro, albeit a rather customised one.

Exactly what's going on in that GPU is still a bit of a mystery and we'll have to wait until someone takes a really good die shot of the chip so we can see the internal structure (here's hoping that Fritzchen Fritz gets a PS5 Pro).

I know none of this will really affect PC gaming in any significant way but given the dearth of new desktop graphics cards at the moment, I've got to get my GPU-phile fix somehow!

Why are gaming GPUs for PCs the one thing AMD just can't get right? That's the multi-billion-dollar mystery following AMD's latest earnings call for professional bean counters (via Seeking Alpha) despite a promise that the chip maker's next-gen RDNA 4 graphics is on track for early 2025.

AMD's Lisa Su, celebrating her 10th anniversary as CEO, explained that the company's revenues have hit a record high in the third quarter of this year at $6.8 billion. That was achieved courtesy of healthy increases in revenues across data centre CPUs and GPUs, plus CPUs for client PCs and laptops.

But once again, Su had to concede that gaming revenues were down. In AMD parlance, "gaming" means a combination of graphics cards for PCs and custom APUs for games consoles, most obviously the Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation.

All told, AMD said revenue for gaming fell fully 69% year-on-year to $462 or well under 10% of AMD's overall revenues. That sounds catastrophic, and it kind of is. However, much of that is down to the inevitable cyclical slump in console sales as the two big beasts from Sony and Microsoft continue to age.

Su pointed to the upcoming PS5 Pro as a cause for optimism in the near term. But as for PC graphics cards specifically, unfortunately AMD doesn't break out the numbers separately.

Su would only say that, "revenue declined year-over-year as we prepare for a transition to our next-gen Radeon GPUs based on our RDNA 4 architecture. In addition to a strong increase in gaming performance, RDNA 4 delivers significantly higher ray-tracing performance and adds new AI capabilities. We are on track to launch the first RDNA 4 GPUs in early 2025."

The thing is, AMD has been reporting non-specific declines in PC gaming graphics for about as long as we can remember now, while third-party analysts continue to report declining market share for the company versus the only other significant player in the market, Nvidia.

For a company that seems to be executing so well on so many fronts, AMD's inability to get PC GPUs right is a bit of a mystery. One possible explanation is that AMD made a big bet moving to a chiplet architecture that didn't pay off.

Instead of producing GPUs using a single large silicon die, AMD decided to split them into smaller pieces. That approach has paid huge dividends for AMD with CPUs. It makes CPUs cheaper and more easily configurable. But getting chiplets to work with GPUs is a very different challenge.

AMD's RDNA 2 graphics, the Radeon RX 6000 series, was a monolithic design and reasonably competitive across all market segments. But RDNA 3, which made that radical move to chiplet engineering for the RX 7700, 7800 and 7900 model ranges, has proven much less so.

What's more, by all accounts AMD has reversed course for RDNA 4, moving back to a simpler monolithic approach to GPU design that won't target the very high end. The implication is that AMD was originally planning to double down on chiplets for RDNA 4, but was forced to rethink late in the development cycle. And that meant it didn't have time to engineer a traditional big monolithic GPU.

For now, most rumours imply that AMD will have another go at chiplets with RDNA 5. But that really does remain to be seen. All we know for sure is that PC graphics is the one blot on AMD's otherwise near flawless copybook.

Of course, you could also argue that AMD's attention has been elsewhere of late, particularly now that the company says revenues from AI GPUs for training and inferencing have gone from pretty much zero to matching CPU revenues from servers, the cloud and PCs combined in the space of just one year.

But the failure of PC graphics is still an odd anomaly for a company generally experiencing roaring success. At least AMD isn't short of a penny if it wants to fix that. Here's hoping it does and it will.

In a post on GPUOpen, a site for game and graphics developers, AMD may well have let slip that it plans to take a leaf from Nvidia's book of rendering tools by including a ray tracing denoiser system in its next generation of FSR. And just as important, it will use an AI neural network to do it all.

Unless you've been firmly sticking with an old graphics card and consciously ignoring every GPU development in the past six years, you'll know that AMD, Intel, and Nvidia have all been furiously busy implementing techniques to improve ray tracing performance and visual quality.

The latter is greatly affected by the number of rays that are used to calculate the lighting, shadows, reflections, and so on. Unfortunately, even on monstrous graphics cards like AMD's RX 7900 XTX and Nvidia's RTX 4090, ray tracing is extremely demanding so games only use a relatively small number of rays.

That results in a very 'noisy' image—grainy in appearance and often full of white spots—so games have to carry out a process called denoising to clean it up. While the likes of Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong, and Alan Wake 2 employ their own denoiser system, Nvidia has an AI-powered one called Ray Reconstruction (RR).

Ray reconstruction is all about making ray-traced images look much better and more accurate, rather than improving performance, and in Cyberpunk 2077, it's noticeably better than the game's own denoiser.

But the GPUOpen post makes it clear that Nvidia won't be the only GPU vendor offering such a feature in the near future. "We are actively researching neural techniques for Monte Carlo denoising with the goal of moving towards real-time path tracing on RDNA GPUs."

AMD's RDNA 2, 3, and 3.5 GPUs can all do denoising right now but only those provided by the game in question and the shader cores handle it all. The fact that the research is specifically about using a neural network to do it means that AMD is very much on board with Nvidia in using AI to boost ray tracing results.

But does this mean that future RDNA GPUs will have dedicated hardware for doing the AI calculations? While Nvidia RTX chips have discrete tensor cores for this job, AMD doesn't and instead uses specific instructions (referred to as WMMA) and the standard shader cores.

That might change in RDNA 4, for two reasons. One is the fact that Sony's PlayStation 5 Pro has a dedicated chip for accelerating the AI routines for its new PSSR upscaler, and AMD will certainly be aware of the benefit discrete hardware brings to such tasks. The second is one of the goals listed in AMD's denoiser research: "Highly optimized performance for real-time path tracing at 4K resolution."

To me, that alone points to AMD having specific hardware for doing the neural networks, because at 4K, general-purpose shader cores just aren't going to be good enough, unless one has a small mountain of them. RNDA GPUs are the only ray tracing chips in the desktop market that don't have dedicated tensor/matrix units, so it's inevitable that AMD will follow suit at some point.

Coupled with the fact that AMD has previously stated that it plans to have all its gaming devices use AI for upscaling too, I'd say there's a very good chance that RDNA 4 chips will have matrix cores that get used to do FSR 4 AI-powered upscaling, frame generation, and denoising.

That said, AMD has always been of the mind that its FSR package should run on as many GPUs as possible—not just Radeon cards, but those from Intel and Nvidia too, as long as they have the right level of shader support.

If the new tech was exclusive to one generation of RDNA hardware, it could well backfire on AMD, given that its discrete GPU market share is pretty small. It's possible that AMD could offer a two-tier FSR 4 system, as Intel does with XeSS, where the full AI-powered package only works on RDNA 4 chips, but a slower and less impressive version is available for everyone.

Until we know more, it's all just guesswork of course, but Radeon fans should take comfort in the fact that AMD is working hard on making its GPUs as modern as possible.