AMD just announced RDNA 4, FSR 4, and Radeon RX 9070 GPUs, but the architecture is where my interest lies. AMD is facing some serious heat in the GPU segment, unlike its clear dominance in the CPU space against Intel. AMD has its work cut out to compete against Intel and Nvidia, not just on hardware alone, but software such as upscaling and frame generation tech. RDNA 4 could make or break AMD's GPU game.
RDNA 4 has the power to change everything
Cranking everything up to 11
While we wait to see how AMD will price its RX 9070 GPUs, what we do know is how the company has worked on improving its graphics architecture with the release of RDNA 4. This generation includes many underlying changes to bring its performance and accompanied tech support up to similar levels as the competition. As an overview, we're looking at an architecture heavily optimized for high-end gaming workloads.
The RX 70 series weren't terrible for gaming and creative use, but they fell short of what Nvidia released. For this generation, AMD improved rasterization and compute efficiency, completely changed how the company approached and implemented Ray Tracing (RT) and upscaling with Machine Learning (ML). There are also some multimedia improvements for both gamers and creators, though enhanced bandwidth efficiency for all workloads should allow AMD cards to be used in a variety of scenarios.
3 reasons why PC gamers should be excited for AMD FSR 4 and RDNA 4
AMD has some cool tech on the way for its next-gen GPUs.
RDNA 4 includes 3rd-gen RT cores, doubling the ray intersection rates, improving Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) compression, and accelerating ray traversal and shading and oriented bounding boxes. What all this means is that each RT core is ready to handle heavier workloads with modern games such as Cyberpunk 2077, which has essentially become a benchmark for graphics cards at this point. Such tasks were incredibly demanding on older AMD RX hardware.
The cache has changed, too. AMD is using 64 MB 3rd-gen Infinity Cache, 8 MB L2 cache, and 2 MB aggregate CU cache. Paired up with the high-speed 256-bit 20 Gbps GDDR6 RAM, you've got ample memory for storing 4K textures. AMD's Matrix Acceleration is also on its third generation, improving tensor dense rates, introducing new 8-bit float (Float8) data types, and ML-based Super Resolution similar to DLSS.
Other notable improvements include the AMD Radiance Display Engine with DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1b, and updated scaling and sharpening. There's a new Dual Media Engine, which helps with the aforementioned general and creator-focused workload improvements. This has updated encoding and decoding, is optimized for low-latency streaming, and has a reported 25% better AVC, H.264, and H.265 performance.
This all comes together to create the very fabric of what the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT are built on. How RDNA 4 could help catapult AMD into a higher market share position remains to be seen, but the company doesn't have to do much to win some favors from the gaming community, especially against Nvidia with how the RTX 50 launch is progressing. Take all these much-needed improvements and roll out some competitively priced graphics cards.
Everything relies on the price
Don't mess this up, AMD!
We kept returning to that dreaded point AMD kept attempting to avoid up until launch: price. How much would the AMD Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT cost? Thankfully, AMD delivered with the RX 9070 costing $549 and 9070 XT sitting at $599. These are good prices, but we shall see what happens at launch with demand and scalpers. These are clearly positioned as 4K-capable graphics cards and are priced accordingly, but to make a splash, AMD needs to crack down on retailer listings.