AMD unveils RX 8000 gaming graphics cards and Zen 5 CPUs for 2024

AMD confirms that RDNA 4 will not be available to consumers for another two years

AMD He showed off his latest roadmap, revealing a slew of hardware releases planned ranging from the launch of Zen 4 CPUs later this year to new APUs for data center use. Perhaps most exciting is the news of new hardware coming later: RDNA 4 graphics cards and Zen 5 processors, slated for release in 2024.

RDNA 4 will (surprisingly) be followed by the new RDNA 3 GPU architecture due for release later this year. This means we’ve gotten our first look at the Radeon RX 8000 GPUs, codenamed “Navi 4x”.

We don’t have any firm numbers on the RX 8000 graphics cards yet, but the flagship is likely the RX 8900 XT and is supposed to use a dual-node architecture using 3nm and 5nm processes. It appears that the Navi 4x family will use the RDNA 4 architecture exclusively, while rumors suggest that the Navi 3x (the RX 7000 series coming this year) may use RDNA 3 for high-end GPUs and RDNA 2 upgraded for cheaper.

AMD has given us a look at the RX 8000 series and its specs indicate a jump in performance.

Details about Zen 5 CPUs are scarcer, after the 2024 release date and everything we can infer from what we know about Zen 4 microarchitecture. AMD promises a massive 35% performance increase from Zen 3 to Zen 4, so we can reasonably expect Big increase in Zen 5.

Interestingly, AMD also mentions that Zen 5 includes “improvements for AI and machine learning,” but doesn’t explain what that means. Since AMD’s FSR optimization technology doesn’t use dedicated AI cores (unlike Nvidia’s DLSS and Intel’s XeSS), should we expect to see AMD dive into AI-powered hardware with these new CPUs? Anyway, we’re excited to see more.

Analysis: Is RDNA 4 worth the wait?

We still don’t even have an exact release date for AMD’s Radeon RX 7000 GPUs, yes, the same ones that will face both Nvidia’s Lovelace graphics cards and Intel’s Arc desktop GPUs later this year (assuming Intel manages to meet Its needs ever – delayed release plans.) So it might seem silly to be excited about the RX 8000 soon.

But today’s news provided more details about the 7000 series cards, and the revelation that some of these lower-end Navi 3x GPUs will run on the current RDNA 2 architecture (with a single GPU node) could be a blow to anyone looking for an affordable graphics card.

We’ll have to wait for the actual performance numbers, but this decision could lead to a huge gaming performance gap between the higher-end RDNA 3 GPUs and the cheaper RDNA 2 upgraded models. If so, anyone looking to upgrade to 1080p or maybe 1440p can wait for the RX 8000 to drop and jump straight from RDNA 2 to RDNA 4.

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