AMD just gave us our first look at the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 RDNA 4 GPUs and I am officially whelmed

pcgamer.com:

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.

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