AMD says RDNA 4 delay is due to software and FSR 4, confirms stock is already at retailers

AMD announced its next-gen desktop graphics card lineup at CES 2025, with the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT expected to launch in March 2025. Later than expected, AMD's GPUs will launch after its direct competition - the new GeForce RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti from NVIDIA - launches sometime in February. We saw several Radeon RX 9070 XT GPUs in person at CES 2025, like this model from ASRock.

The whole RDNA 4 reveal has been confusing because several Radeon RX 9070 XT GPUs were on display at CES; however, details on specs, performance, potential pricing, and other features are being kept under wraps. AMD will present all of this information at an upcoming RDNA 4 reveal event; however, as of writing, there's no indication of when that might be. AMD's David McAfee, who heads up the company's Ryzen and Radeon groups, recently confirmed the March 2025 Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT launch on social media.



In a follow-up post, he confirmed that AMD delayed RDNA 4's launch due to software (see: drivers) and FSR 4 not being ready. By confirming that stock for the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT is already at retailers worldwide, he all but confirms that the decision to delay the launch and reveal was very much a last-minute thing. Speculation and rumor have also pointed to NVIDIA's lower-than-expected price points for the GeForce RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti being a contributing factor, alongside the arrival of DLSS 4 for GeForce RTX gamers.

DLSS 4's updated 'Transformer' model for DLSS Super Resolution is causing quite a stir because it notably improves image quality compared to DLSS 2 and 3. The improvement is so significant that it makes AMD's current FSR 3.1 Super Resolution technology look inferior and utterly obsolete.

The good news is that with FSR 4, the company is finally switching to an AI-based form of upscaling - and after seeing an early version of FSR 4 in action at CES 2025, we were impressed with the results. A significant improvement for FSR, however, image quality is a step or two behind NVIDIA's latest DLSS 4 update. The good news is that FSR 4 will be compatible with all games with the latest FSR 3.

1 implementation; however, it will be exclusive to the new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 X RDNA 4 GPUs as it requires more advanced AI hardware. With the GeForce RTX 5090's launch showing a decent but not mind-blowing raw performance improvement over the GeForce RTX 4090, NVIDIA's new DLSS 4 (with the new Transformer model and Multi Frame Generation) and RTX Neural Rendering technologies have proven to be the 'wow' factor for the GeForce RTX 50 Series. This makes AMD's decision to delay RDNA 4's launch to ensure FSR 4 is ready on day one smart.

Most PC gamers enable technologies like DLSS, FSR, and XSS to get a 'free performance boost' when gaming, so not having a viable alternative for Radeon on day one would be a mistake..