Something to look forward to: Following months of rumors, AMD has stopped just short of confirming plans to launch two Radeon RX 8000 graphics cards early next year. While the company hasn't officially named the GPUs, recent firmware code and comments from AMD leave little doubt of an impending CES announcement.
A recent update on AMD's ROCm GitHub page contains the company's first direct mention of the Radeon RX 8800 and 8600, two graphics cards from the upcoming RDNA4 lineup. The company has also announced that it will discuss gaming and other subjects at a January 6 CES keynote, stoking anticipation for a GPU unveiling.
A commit from last week on AMD's public xla development page lists the two cards under the label "gfx12," which follows a "gfx11" designation assigned to RX 7900, indicating that "gfx12" is a codename for the company's next-generation GPUs. Rumors have long suggested that RDNA4 will see an early 2025 launch, but a complete picture of AMD's plans is still materializing.
During the company's earnings call for the third quarter of 2024, CEO Lisa Su confirmed that the first RDNA4 cards are set for early 2025, promising new AI features and dramatic increases in ray tracing performance. The comments substantiate earlier reports that AMD is working to catch up with Nvidia in those two areas.
Ray tracing runs significantly faster on Team Green's RTX GPUs, and tests show that Nvidia's machine learning-based DLSS upscaling technology handles lower resolutions better than AMD's spatial FSR method. These gaps are a likely factor behind Nvidia's commanding 88 percent market share in the discrete graphics sector.
Jack Huynh, senior vice president of AMD's Computing and Graphics Business Group, previously confirmed that the next stage of FSR, FSR4, will incorporate AI-based upscaling and frame generation. The technology aims to enhance energy efficiency, possibly in order to improve battery life on handheld PCs using the company's upcoming Ryzen Z2 Extreme APU.
Furthermore, leakers recently described an RX 8800 XT that outperforms the 7900 XTX by around 45 percent in multiple games featuring ray tracing. The so-called "epic" improvement allegedly makes the 8800 XT a match for Nvidia's RTX 4080 Super and possibly the upcoming 5070. The RDNA4 card includes 16GB of VRAM, draws 220W, and enters mass production later this month.
The company intends to focus on the mid-range and mainstream GPU sectors, conceding next year's enthusiast race to Nvidia's RTX 5080 and 5090, which are also expected to appear at CES. So an RX 8900 seems unlikely for now. However, a three-way mainstream graphics card competition is brewing between RDNA4, the RTX 5060, and Intel's recently unveiled Arc Battlemage lineup.