Las Vegas is once again the venue for CES 2025 and AMD are quick off the mark with their first major event keynote of the year. Pre-briefings touched on desktop processors, mobile hardware and even software updates through the presentation, but the primary highlight for many should have been the reveal of new GPU silicon in the form of the Radeon RX 9070-series.
New Year, New Look, New Silicon.
More than two years on from the launch of the Radeon RX 7000-series in 2022, AMD we set to gently introducing the RX 9070-series as a broad replacement for a section of their product stack ranging from the 7800 XT up to the 7900 XT. As suggested by the new naming convention, the cards will go head-to-head with NVIDIA’s RTX xx70-series cards (currently the RTX 4070-series), orienting strongly towards the upper end of the gaming segment without encroaching on the high-performance/halo tiers.
The Radeon RX 9070-series will be RDNA 4’s debut outing. This major architectural update features undisclosed changes to most aspects of the rendering pipeline for improved performance, including 2nd Gen. AI Accelerators, 3rd Gen. Ray Tracing Accelerators, and 2nd Gen. AMD Radiance Display Engine. RDNA 4 processors will be fabricated on TSMC’s 4nm process, helping to keep voltages and hence power draw under control.
The series should launch as two SKUs, the Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070. Both are expected to be available in Q1 2025 with designs from a broad array of partners including ASUS, ASRock, Powercolor, GIGABYTE and XFX. Notably absent from the announcement is MSI.
During pre-briefings AMD were tight-lipped on expected performance and pricing, likely keeping their powder dry ahead of NVIDIA’s expected reveal of the GeForce RTX 50-series later today. Their naming scheme does indicate where their expectations lay however, expecting that the RX 9070-series will be at least competitive with RTX 5070 Ti / RTX 5070-series cards on a price-performance basis.
More information on the RX 9070-series is expected later this quarter after considerable soul-searching on whether adjusting their naming scheme just before their competitor makes a major announcement was a wise choice.
FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 Goes Proprietary, Dabbles in Machine Learning
Unlike the aborted RDA 4 announcement, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 was actually revealed during the CES keynote. The 4th Generation of their upscaling technology is set to take advantage of the new capabilities of RX 9070-series GPUs specifically, leveraging their improved AI capabilities for upscaling that's accelerated by the results of machine learning in hardware. FSR 4 will be proprietary and exclusive to the Radeon 9070-series at launch and likely rolling out to other RDNA 4 hardware as it arrives.
Locking FSR 4 down to the latest AMD hardware is a major departure for the red team. Open, hardware-agnostic standards had until recently been their preferred approach to upscaling, but ongoing problems with the technology and Sony’s recent decision to opt for an in-house solution on the PS5 Pro signalled that this might not be the case going forward. AMD might have finally come to the conclusion that a machine learning-based approach, similar to their competition, would be the only way to get the results necessary, despite the problems it brings.
FSR 4 will incorporate 4K upscaling, Frame Generation and low-latency protocols for a smooth gaming experience, but the biggest hurdle will be image quality. Output frames from ML-based rendering are only as good as the model used to generate them; the first generation or two can be rough, as we saw with DLSS. FSR 4 will be supported on games that already incorporate FSR 3.1.
What We Don’t Know Matters
AMD playing their cards close to their chest might seem like the smart move prior to their competition’s expected blow-out keynote later today. However, without key details to get their audience excited, AMD’s GPU news might be lost in the general noise that is CES’s hardware hubbub.
We had hoped to see surprises from AMD’s keynote, detail that will excite (positive) discussion and plough inroads into NVIDIA’s dominant discrete GPU market share. This non-launch was not the sort of surprise we had in mind.
