AMD unveils Radeon RX 9070 GPUs to challenge NVIDIA's hardware
What's the story
AMD has unveiled its latest generation of graphics processing units (GPUs), the Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
Built on AMD's cutting-edge RDNA 4 architecture, the new GPUs come with AI-powered FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4) upscaling and take on NVIDIA's latest RTX 50 series GPUs.
The company plans to release them in Q1 via various video card manufacturers, but has not yet revealed their specs, pricing, or exact launch dates.
Tech upgrade
AMD's RDNA 4 architecture promises significant AI boost
The new RDNA 4 architecture is a ground-up build by AMD, promising a significant AI boost in the GPUs.
The company has enhanced the compute units in RNDA 4, upgraded its ray-tracing engine and performance, and improved media encoding quality.
Built on a 4nm process, the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 cards will feature AMD's second-generation AI accelerators, third-generation ray-tracing accelerators, as well as a second-generation radiance display engine.
AI integration
AMD's FSR 4 to debut with Radeon RX 9070-series GPUs
Along with these new Radeon RX 9070-series GPUs, the RDNA 4 architecture will also enable AMD to launch FSR 4.
FSR 4 is an AI-driven update to AMD's upscaling and frame-generation technology, tailored specifically for RDNA 4 and its dedicated AI accelerator hardware.
This means FSR 4 will only be available with a Radeon RX 9070-series graphics card for now, and will work with games already supporting FSR 3.1.
Gaming integration
FSR 4 coming in 'Call of Duty: Black Ops 6'
Matt Booty, President of Game Content and Studios at Microsoft, confirmed during AMD's CES keynote that FSR 4 will be integrated into Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 later this year.
However, AMD has not yet given any indication of how FSR 4 will compare against NVIDIA's DLSS tech or what kind of performance boost/image quality improvement we can expect from this next-gen FSR.
Software update
AMD's Adrenalin software to get new AI-powered features
Along with the hardware improvements, AMD is also upgrading its Adrenalin software with new AI-powered capabilities.
These include generating images with AI models, summarizing local documents, and interacting with an AMD chatbot for queries about graphics settings and more.
The company has also clarified its branding strategy, saying it will reserve the 8000-series branding for RDNA 3.5 mobile GPUs.