Help us, AMD RDNA 4! You’re our only hope

NVIDIA’S BLACKWELL ARCHITECTURE has landed with a bit of a wet splat. It’s not that the GPUs are bad; it’s that you simply can’t find any of them in stock at reasonable prices. There’s also the matter of the new cards offering relatively limited gen-on-gen performance improvements—unless you’re specifically using Multi Frame Generation (MFG) as a smoothing substitute for higher frame rates.

Jarred Walton

AMD’s answer is RDNA 4, which walks back from the GPU chiplet architecture of the prior generation. Specifically, AMD has taken steps to make its ray tracing hardware viable, and beefed up the AI compute potential. After the RTX 20-series launched in 2018, this is what we wanted from AMD. Better late than never, I guess. To put things in perspective, the Navi 48 GPU at the heart of the RX 9070 XT has 64 RDNA 4 Compute Units (CUs) and a 256-bit GDDR6 memory interface with 16GB of VRAM clocked at 20 Gbps; nearly the same as the previous RX 7800 XT chip, with four extra CUs and a tiny bump to memory speeds. On paper, that looks pretty mediocre: 6.7 percent more shader cores and 2.6 percent more…

You're reading a preview of

Maximum PC (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2025

DiscountMags is a licensed distributor (not a publisher) of the above content and Publication through Zinio LLC. Accordingly, we have no editorial control over the Publications. Any opinions, advice, statements, services, offers or other information or content expressed or made available by third parties, including those made in Publications offered on our website, are those of the respective author(s) or publisher(s) and not of DiscountMags. DiscountMags does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, truthfulness, or usefulness of all or any portion of any publication or any services or offers made by third parties, nor will we be liable for any loss or damage caused by your reliance on information contained in any Publication, or your use of services offered, or your acceptance of any offers made through the Service or the Publications. For content removal requests, please contact Zinio.