AMD says ‘the performance data out there for RDNA 4 is completely inaccurate’

In a cosy backstage chat, post-AMD CES keynote, David McAfee told us that everything you’ve heard about RDNA 4 performance is “completely inaccurate”. McAfee and fellow AMD exec, Frank Azor were explaining the absence of either new RX 9070 or RX 9070 XT graphics cards from the keynote, fielding our questions about the new GPUs, new naming scheme, and AMD’s priorities for this “gamer-first” new Navi 4 architecture.

Though McAfee’s assertion about the inaccuracy of the rumoured RDNA 4 GPU performance could be a bit of a double-edged stabby thing. The last rumours we heard were suggesting a 45% uplift in ray tracing performance and rasterised frame rates on par with an RTX 4080 Super, which would be great. If it’s more than that I’m going to be stunned and saddened if it’s less.

“The performance data that’s out there for RDNA 4 is completely inaccurate,” says McAfee, before Azor chimes in: “The other thing I would tell you is nobody, nobody has the final drivers, so how can the data be accurate? Not even the card manufacturers have it.”

So, as McAfee says, “don’t trust everything you read on the internet.” Except this. Cos, y’know, you can trust me.

But we will know all about the new architecture later in Q1, as Jack Huynh noted while quickly glossing over comments about RDNA 4 from Microsoft’s Matt Booty in a video appearance in the keynote.

“We absolutely love the gaming community,” says Huynh, “and we look forward to telling you more about RDNA 4 and FSR 4 later this quarter. Now let’s shift gears to AI PCs…”

Yes, we were expecting to hear a bit more about AMD’s upcoming RDNA 4 graphics cards at CES this year, and we did indeed get some deets out of a pre-briefing ahead of the show, but the new RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT were notable by their absence from the Jack Huynh’s CES keynote.

The first thing to say is that AMD is keen to point out this is nothing to do with any manufacturing or development slip.

“RDNA 4 is absolutely on track from a development standpoint,” McAfee tells us. “What we are seeing in the lab is right where we want it to be, hitting all of our performance and power expectations.

“This has nothing to do with bumps in the road and the development of this product, it’s simply product timing and readiness to deliver the strongest performance punch that we can as we bring the product to market.”

So, was it because of Nvidia’s Jen-Hsun Huang taking to the CES stage later tonight to presumably unveil the new RTX 50-series Blackwell GPUs?

Azor fields this one: “There isn’t any one single thing. ‘Oh, we didn’t bring RDNA 4 to the show because of the comp[etition].’ it’s a multitude of different things. Did that weigh into our decision? Yeah, of course it went into our decision. But it isn’t any one thing. It’s giving it the proper stage.

“It takes a long time to explain graphics properly. You have all the software elements, you have the ISV elements, you have the upscaling elements. We have to introduce you to the machine learning capabilities that RDNA 4 is going to have, which is going to take a little bit more time.

“So it’s a lot of different factors, but I’m not going to tell you that that wasn’t a factor that didn’t weigh into our decision, of course, it did.”

The new Navi 4 cards, the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, are different kinds of GPU to what Nvidia is expected to drop today, and AMD inevitably isn’t going to want them swallowed up in all the hype surrounding new mega-powerful, mega-expensive GeForce cards, or compared with them.

RDNA 4, whether by design or necessity, is more about targeting an efficient graphics card release, from both a perf-per-watt perspective as well as a pricing one. As Azor tells us, it’s about building “a gamer-first, consumer-first type of card.”

But we probably won’t have to wait long to see RDNA 4 get its time in the sun, and if the reaction around Intel’s B580 card is anything to go by, people are very keen on new, affordable GPUs. Who knew, eh?