AMD may still wait for Nvidia before unleashing RDNA 4

By Monica J. White Published January 13, 2025

AMD’s future best graphics cards should be right around the corner, but with no specifics, it’s hard to say when exactly we’ll reach that particular corner. However, a new leak from the Chiphell forum implies that whatever release date AMD may have had in mind for its RX 9000 series GPUs may have changed. The most interesting part is that the leaker implies Nvidia may have played a part in this decision.

Before we dive in, remember that all of this is speculation. During its CES 2025 keynote, AMD barely spoke about RDNA 4, so the release dates are a mystery. Some leakers repeated a rumored release date of January 23 in the past few days, though, and according to Napoleon on the Chiphell forums, that may no longer be true.

AMD is said to be holding back and waiting for Nvidia to play its cards. What does that mean, exactly? We know that the GPUs are ready, as two of AMD’s partners have already showcased them at CES — so it almost certainly cannot be an engineering issue.

RDNA4 delay

Waiting for NVIDIA to play their cards firsthttps://t.co/VHwGT2MBuc

— HXL (@9550pro) January 13, 2025

It could still be a matter of performance per dollar, though. AMD may want to know more about the performance of Nvidia’s RTX 5080, or perhaps even the RTX 5070, in order to set the pricing for its own cards in a competitive way. More news from the Chiphell forums told us last week that the RX 9070 XT might cost anywhere between $480 and $550, which would already be a competitive price tag given the card’s rumored performance. Most leaks currently pin it at around the same level as the RTX 4070 Ti or even the RTX 4080, both of which are pricier.

It’s hard to say whether there’s any merit to this particular leak. We don’t know whether that January 23 date was real to begin with, which makes it harder to judge. However, we do have some information about RDNA 4.

For starters, the GPUs have been spotted at B&H, with preorder dates starting on January 23. To that end, many leakers believed that January 22 was the date for the review embargo, which gave more weight to that January 23 preorder date. However, the GPUs have since been taken down from the B&H website.

AMD has also told us that it would release RDNA 4 in a matter of weeks. That could mean anything, but it also specified that it’d be within the first quarter of 2025 — which means before the end of March, but “not March 31,” as AMD executive Frank Azor specified.

If we assume that the January 23 release date was real, AMD would’ve beaten Nvidia to the punch. The first RTX 50-series GPUs are set to arrive on January 30, with the RTX 5070 Ti and the RTX 5070 to follow sometime in February. However, it almost feels less important for AMD to bring its cards to market before Nvidia right now, considering that the RX 9070 XT will not be able to compete against either. AMD’s offerings are in a different bracket, both performance- and pricing-wise. We will have to wait for an announcement from AMD to find out the true release date.