AMD announced its latest RDNA 4 graphics cards at CES 2025 this week, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and AMD Radeon RX 9070, both targeting the midrange graphics card segment, as was widely expected.
There isn’t much that we know about the two new cards yet, other than the new numbering scheme is intended to make it easier to compare AMD’s Radeon cards against the competition, namely Nvidia.
Under this new numbering scheme, the Radeon RX XX70 cards are now meant to compete against Nvidia’s XX70 cards, with the Radeon RX 9070 XT going up against the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and the RX 9070 going up against the RTX 5070. AMD has also teased a later launch for Radeon RX 9060 cards, which would then go up against the Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti and RTX 5060.
Things get a bit more complicated when comparing these new cards against their predecessors, with AMD indicating that the RX 9070 series is replacing everything from the AMD RX 7900 XT to the RX 7800 XT, while the RX 9060 series is roughly replacing the RX 7700 XT and RX 7600 XT (the RX 7600 would presumably be replaced by a lower tier than these two).
It hasn’t said whether or not there will be any RX 9080 or RX 9090 cards, but given all of the talk about AMD conceding the premium enthusiast segment to Nvidia this generation, the 9070 and 9060 series cards are likely to be the only cards we get this go around.
No price or firm release date has been given, only that we should expect the new Radeon cards in Q1 2025.
Is abandoning the enthusiast segment a smart move for AMD?
AMD’s apparent decision to cede the enthusiast segment to focus on the midrange and upper-budget segments has been telegraphed by AMD for a while now, and it appears that this is in fact what AMD has planned.
Personally, I think it’s a great move on AMD’s part. If you’ve got a grand to spend on a graphics card, you’re all but certain to go for an Nvidia GPU. But the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE currently sits atop our best graphics card list for a reason. The RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 are ideal for 4K gaming, but according to Valve’s Steam Hardware Survey, the vast, vast majority of gamers out there are gaming at 1080p, with 1440p gaming being the area with the most growth. 4K gamers, meanwhile, make up less than 5% of gamers out there.
Which makes a lot of sense. Gaming at 4K is extremely expensive for increasingly marginal benefit. As TechRadar’s components editor, believe me, I’ve extensively tested all of the best 4K graphics cards over and over again, and I can hardly tell the difference between 1440p and 4K in terms of visual sharpness, but I can sure tell the difference in terms of framerate, and unless you have a 120Hz or better gaming monitor, you’ll never get to see the much faster 1440p framerate that a 4K graphics card like the RTX 4080 (or AMD RX 7900 XTX, for that matter) can give you.
The only people who can really benefit from a 4K graphics card at this point are people with a hell of a lot of money to spend on building the best gaming PC possible with a high-end gaming monitor. That’s a very narrow market, and if you’re that kind of gamer, you’re just going to splurge on a premium Nvidia card.
AMD’s apparent acknowledgment of this gives it a great opportunity to market its otherwise fantastic graphics cards to the vast majority of gamers, especially those whose goodwill has been burned by Nvidia’s increasingly high prices.
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John.Loeffler@futurenet.com (John Loeffler)
