AMD's "early March" RDNA 4 GPU launch is confirmed, and it could make or break the company's struggling PC gaming division

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RDNA 4 is about to give NVIDIA some much-needed competition in the GPU market.

Acer Predator BiFrost Radeon RX 7600 OC graphics card unboxed
The Radeon RX 7600 picture here is about to be usurped by new RDNA 4 GPUs from AMD. (Image credit: Ben Wilson | Windows Central)

The prolonged wait for new Radeon RDNA 4 graphics cards will soon be over: AMD's next-gen GPUs are launching in "early March" according to AMD CEO Lisa Su in the most recent AMD Q4 2024 Earnings Call.

With NVIDIA's recent launch of RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 flagship GPUs without any real availability — not to mention relatively minor gains in terms of raw performance compared to RTX 40-series hardware — AMD's opportunity to capture the mid-range market has never been better.

In the call, Su specifically called out AMD's GPU revenue decline in 2024 as the company sold off its last-gen RDNA 3 stock to make room for the new Radeon hardware. Here's the full section regarding RDNA 4:

"In Gaming Graphics, revenue declined year over year, as we accelerated channel sellout in preparation for the launch of our next-gen Radeon 9000 series GPUs. Our focus with this generation is to address the highest volume portion of the enthusiast gaming market with our new RDNA 4 architecture. RDNA 4 delivers significantly better rate tracing performance and add support for AI-powered upscaling technology that will bring high-quality 4K gaming to mainstream players when the first Radeon 9070 series GPUs go on sale in early March."

This news, spotted by PCGamer, comes just a couple of weeks after AMD VP and GM of Ryzen and Radeon David McAfee took to X (formerly Twitter) to share a similar launch date. McAfee only mentioned "March" as a launch time, so at least we now know we won't have to wait quite as long. That's especially great news for anyone who's been waiting to upgrade and didn't manage to land an NVIDIA card.

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This all comes on the heels of AMD's modified CES 2025 presentation that didn't end up mentioning RDNA 4 at all despite press kits being sent out to media outlets. In the press kit, RDNA 4 was revealed with new Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 desktop GPUs. AMD even had a booth at CES showing off improvements in FidelityFX Super Resolution 4, which has changed over to a machine-learning approach to better compete with NVIDIA's DLSS. FSR 4 looks like quite an improvement over its FSR 3.1 predecessor, and it's one of the main reasons why I might opt for a new RDNA 4 GPU when the time comes.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT

A slide showing off new RDNA 4 GPUs that were never presented at CES 2025. (Image credit: AMD)

Rumors have it that retailers have been building up RDNA 4 stock since early 2025, and some cards have apparently even made it into the hands of reviewers. My initial reaction to McAfee's launch news was positive, and I surmised that AMD would likely benefit from the delay.

NVIDIA isn't doing itself any favors with severely limited RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 stock, which will likely still be plaguing shoppers in early March. Of course, NVIDIA is still expected to launch its RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 in February, which could come with better availability. Regardless, AMD's new Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 are expected to go toe-to-toe with NVIDIA's 5070-series cards.

AMD has two avenues to success, and both will likely hinge on what NVIDIA does with its February launch. If the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti outperform AMD's new GPUs, AMD can lower the price and draw in value-conscious consumers. If AMD's new GPUs come out ahead of NVIDIA's mid-range cards, they'll likely sell themselves as long as there's solid availability.

AMD's gaming division needs a win

Amd Lisa Su

AMD CEO Lisa Su on stage. (Image credit: AMD)

NVIDIA is in dire need of stronger GPU competition, especially in the mid-range market. Intel's "Battlemage" GPUs are mighty impressive, but they target the budget range of the market. That leaves AMD to go up against the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti with new RDNA 4 hardware.

Beyond giving NVIDIA some competition, AMD desperately needs a win for its gaming division. As Lisa Su mentions in the earnings call, "revenue declined 59% year over year to $563 million" in the gaming segment.

Su notes that part of the decline comes from declining console sales:

"Semi-custom sales declined as expected as Microsoft and Sony focused on reducing channel inventory. Overall, this console generation has been very strong. Highlighted by cumulative unit shipments surpassing $100 million in the fourth quarter. Looking forward, we believe channel inventories have now normalized and semi-custom sales will return to more historical patterns in 2025."

Heading into 2025, AMD plans to "combine the client and the gaming segment into one single reportable segment to align with how we manage the business."

AMD needs to make a positive impression with its RDNA 4 GPUs, not just to appease shareholders, but also to give consumers more choice on the open market. NVIDIA's RTX 5000 GPUs so far stand unopposed, and that needs to change in March.

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Cale Hunt
Cale Hunt
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Cale Hunt brings to Windows Central more than eight years of experience writing about laptops, PCs, accessories, games, and beyond. If it runs Windows or in some way complements the hardware, there’s a good chance he knows about it, has written about it, or is already busy testing it. 

1 Comment Comment from the forums
  • GraniteStateColin
    Great article and excited to see how the upcoming AMD boards perform. I really hope they exceed performance (including for path tracing in games) of the RTX 4070 and come in priced for the mass market. I also hope this is roughly the tech we get in the next-gen consoles.

    I take some issue with the common theme among reviewers, as stated in this piece, "...relatively minor gains in terms of raw performance compared to RTX 40-series hardware." That is true, but a focus on "raw performance" is missing the point. It's like only looking at GHz ratings for PC's, which have barely crept up at all since hitting 3GHz in the early 2000's. Features like multi-threading and operations per clock cycle have enabled CPUs of today to vastly outperform CPUs of prior generations with no real change to the "raw performance" in terms of # of single-threaded operations possible per second.

    As things currently stand in game development, ray tracing and path tracing are far more important to gaming than improvements in raw pixel moving. Features like DLSS and frame generation are hugely important. It's absolutely fair to criticize their negatives or when they introduce artifacts, like criticizing a turbo lag on a sports car or that not all apps can take advantage of multithreading, but make no mistake that those features are what allow game developers to create radically improved game experiences for users, and ultimately it's the changing UX that matters most.

    I would ask reviewers to focus less on synthetic benchmark "raw" performance, and more on actual FPS and graphical fidelity in games with all the capabilities of the card in use. I know that's a little bit more work, but that would be giving readers more actionable and useful information than synthetic benchmarks with the most important features of these newer cards turned off.

    We're already starting to see games like Indiana Jones and the upcoming Doom release requiring ray tracing-capable hardware. When developers believe they can require sufficient RT support that they don't need to spend hundreds of hours or more to bake-in fake lighting tricks (which also never look as good as ray tracing anyway), this releases a HUGE amount of time and effort to focus on other aspects of the game, or create more DLC, or move on to the next game more quickly.

    So the real win in the upcoming AMD GPU announcement will be if it provides mass-market pricing and works its way into consoles so that path tracing capable hardware is the norm and we can finally phase out the requirement for game devs to design lighting solutions just to support older hardware.
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