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.