AMD's CES 2025 livestream was a jam-packed 45-minute show with a slew of product announcements on the company's latest tech. However, one key omission is drawing criticism: AMD didn't mention its next-gen RDNA 4 GPUs at all, even though the company teased the new architecture to the press before the event. After the event, we met with AMD executives David McAfee and Frank Azor in a small group meeting, and the pair immediately addressed the elephant in the room, chalking the omission up to a strict time limit that would have impeded their ability to share enough information. Other factors also impacted their decision, like Nvidia's looming announcements tonight at CES, but AMD now plans to reveal more details later this quarter.
"Some of the news that was hotly anticipated, RDNA 4, was absent from the press conference today," McAfee began. "So we wanted to just clear the air on why it was not part of it, what our product plans are, and what to expect from AMD throughout the quarter as we get a little bit closer to launching that product and the Navi 4 / RDNA 4 family of graphics products."
"Just to set the record straight to begin with, the lack of RDNA 4 in this press conference has nothing to do with product development or any of that. The chips are in the lab, and they are performing well. It's hitting all the targets in terms of performance and power. You'll see many of our board partners showing off their designs, so they'll all be out there talking about products that they have coming from the RDNA 4 family products during CES."
McAfee explained that the keynote was only 45 minutes long, and with a slew of other products to announce, the company simply couldn't dedicate enough time in the presentation to the new GPUs to correctly frame the product. Ultimately, they would have only had about five minutes to introduce the new GPUs.
"Graphics products and graphics launches are complicated, and there's a lot that has to be explained to really do it justice. We wanted to make sure, as we launch RDNA 4, that we do it justice and we cover the hardware improvements, the technology, the software, the FSR4, and the driver enhancements. All of that needs to be covered to really satisfy what gaming enthusiasts care about most," McAfee said.
"We made a lot of decisions in RDNA 4 that are different from prior generations. We know that most gamers buy graphics cards that are well, well south of $1,000, and we built the RDNA 4 architecture really from the ground up to make sure that we're delivering features and the performance and capabilities that gamers in the largest volume segments of the market care about most."
This aligns with AMD's recent admission that it's deprioritizing chasing high-end halo GPUs with RDNA 4. It has done that in the past as well, with Polaris and before that, the HD 5000 and 4000 series. Instead, it will focus on the mid-range segment of the market. McAfee said that enthusiasts can expect a dramatic generational jump in ray tracing performance with RDNA 4, as well as expanded machine learning and AI compute capabilities that power complementary features like FSR.
Now the company plans to release a separate tranche of information later this quarter that will go into more detail on RDNA 4. We have the names, we know the architecture is changing, but beyond that we don't have any official specs. We may see some preliminary performance numbers leak during the coming days as well, and AMD noted that no one currently has the latest RDNA 4 drivers to test with, so any performance data isn't going to show how the final cards will perform. Given it's a new architecture and the GPUs won't arrive until later this quarter, it's a safe bet that driver optimizations and tuning are ongoing.
"There were certain things we put in the press release that we didn't put into the press conference," Azor added. "Like the Z2 processors, for example, and we tried to include RDNA 4, we really did. We built the content." But numerous factors scuttled those plans. One of those factors was Nvidia's pending announcements tonight at CES 2025.
"There's no way, with everything else we had to do at this show, that you would have left happy if we had included RDNA 4 in the keynote. And not just because of time [limits], but the pricing perspective, performance review, FSR4 capabilities, architecture, and the incumbent [Nvidia] is going to launch something later tonight." Azor said. "Why not wait and see what they're going to do? Whatever we do to respond would just benefit the market. So it's good for gamers."
"This was a no-win scenario," Azor continued. "We debated all these different options and whether or not our customers, the gamers, the market, were going to walk away from today and say, 'Wow, that was amazing, I was blown away by it' if we included it in there for five or eight minutes. Why? Why do that? Let's give it its proper time. Let's put together a recipe that's going to win — positioning, performance, pricing, and the time that it deserves, and show people that we actually do care about gaming."
Azor also noted that the company didn't want to feed a narrative that it doesn't care about RDNA 4 because it only spent five minutes on the topic. McAfee's and Azor's statements explain the rationale behind the case of the missing RDNA 4 GPUs, but it probably won't fully staunch the debate among enthusiasts. For now, we'll have to simply wait for more details on the RDNA 4 GPUs.
