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 w69 slot 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 , 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 , so really it looks like a potential would be the card to beat for the RX 9070 XT moving forward.
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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?