Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

AMD CEO teases RDNA 4 release as gaming revenue drops by 69%

By
AMD CEO Lisa Su delivering AMD's CES 2023 keynote.
AMD

There’s been a lot of speculation about the potential release date for AMD’s upcoming RDNA 4 graphics cards. Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, has just put an end to most of these claims. While initial predictions pinned AMD’s future best graphics cards at the end of 2024, AMD now confirms that RDNA 4 is on track to launch in early 2025. This announcement arrives alongside a steep decrease in AMD’s gaming revenue.

AMD has been quiet about RDNA 4 (or RX 8000 series) for months, but we’ve seen many reports from various leakers who had something to say about the potential release date for these next-gen GPUs. At the beginning of 2024, these claims were fairly optimistic, with some leakers claiming that the AMD Radeon RX 8000 series might launch as early as this summer. That  did not happen, and as the months went by, many of them adopted a more conservative release window sometime in 2025. Now, thanks to AMD’s third-quarter earnings call, we know that those later claims were correct.

Recommended Videos

Su spoke about AMD’s decline in gaming graphics revenue as she revealed that RDNA 4 GPUs are set to be released in early 2025.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!
Privacy Policy

“In gaming graphics, revenue declined year-over-year as we prepare for a transition to our next-gen Radeon GPUs based on our RDNA 4 architecture,” Su said, as quoted by VideoCardz. “In addition to a strong increase in gaming performance, RDNA 4 delivers significantly higher ray tracing performance and adds new AI capabilities.”

RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT on a pink background.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

The comment about a performance increase makes me curious. AMD itself admitted that it’s targeting the mainstream market with its next-gen GPUs in a recent conversation with Tom’s Hardware. Leakers predict that its new flagship may not beat the RX 7900 XTX in performance, so an increase is hard to picture right now — but AMD is planning to improve the performance-per-dollar aspect of its GPUs, so that’s where it might excel.

In its previous earnings call, AMD revealed that its gaming revenue was down by a staggering 48% year-over-year. The company didn’t expect things to get better, and it appears that they have not improved whatsoever. The report reveals that AMD’s gaming segment revenue in the third quarter was down 69% year-over-year, and the company cites “a decrease in semi-custom revenue” as the main culprit here.

With Nvidia’s RTX 50-series also rumored to launch in early 2025, and both companies expected to make announcements at CES 2025, we’re about to see the GPU market start heating up.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Monica J. White
Monica J. White
Computing Writer
Monica is a computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…
Next-gen GPUs are coming ‘later this year’ — but which?
RX 7900 XTX slotted into a test bench.

What's going on with next-gen graphics cards? I've been asking myself that question for months now. Reports about Nvidia's RTX 50-series and AMD's RDNA 4 first pointed to a 2024 release, but most sources now agree that we won't see any new GPUs until 2025. Except EK Water Blocks, a company that now claims that we'll see an announcement "later this year."

EK Water Blocks makes liquid cooling solutions, and it's partnered with both Nvidia and AMD, which makes it harder to determine which GPU manufacturer it's talking about here. According to the latest leaks, both GPU makers aren't launching their new products this year, although one source (admittedly uncertain) claimed that we'd have an announcement this month. This is now the second leak in as many days that implies good news in 2024.

Read more
This fascinating new GPU completely ditches fans
ASRock Radeon RX 7900 XTX Passive 24GB graphics card.

We may still be in limbo when it comes to next-gen graphics cards, but ASRock just launched a couple of interesting AMD GPUs. The ASRock RX 7900 XTX Passive and the RX 7900 XT Passive are two of AMD's most powerful consumer graphics cards, but this time around, they're completely fanless. That's right -- without an active cooling solution, these cards rely entirely on passive cooling.

At a glance, no one would've said that the cards in question are part of AMD's RX 7000 series. After all, the RX 7900 XTX normally features three fans, but this one comes with zero, and it's also significantly thinner than ASRock's other versions of the RX 7900 XTX. Both cards are now just dual-slot, and they're both shorter and thinner than their air-cooled counterparts.

Read more
AMD may finally have an answer to Nvidia’s dominance
RX 7900 XTX installed in a test bench.

Although AMD makes some of the best graphics cards, there's one thing it has always struggled with when compared to Nvidia: ray tracing. Even though RDNA 3 brought some improvements in that regard, Nvidia remains the king of ray tracing. However, a new leak about the upcoming RDNA 4 generation tells us that things might be about to change -- and the PlayStation 5 Pro might already benefit.

The scoop comes from Kepler_L2 on X (formerly Twitter), who shared a list of ray tracing features that are being added with RDNA 4. The leaker also claims that most of these should be available in the PS5 Pro, which won't run on RDNA 4 entirely, but is said to utilize parts of it to supplement the RDNA 3.5 chip that it'll house.

Read more