There’s been lots of reports about AMD’s changing strategy around its desktop graphics cards, but we finally have something a bit more definitive.
When asked directly at a press Q&A at IFA 2024, Jack Huynh, AMD’s senior vice president and general manager of Computing and Graphics, discussed how the company’s upcoming approach to competing with Nvidia would change moving forward. The goal is still to achieve higher market share against Nvidia, but that may not involve releasing the high-end flagship tier that some PC enthusiasts want.
The last time AMD released a flagship desktop GPU was at the end of 2022, when it launched the Radeon RX 7900 XTX.
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Specifics on AMD’s future plans weren’t provided, of course, but Huynh made it pretty clear that the near future of AMD graphics didn’t involve trying to compete with something like the Nvidia RTX 5090 — if that GPU is indeed in the works as it’s reported to be. Huynh, proudly claiming to be a gamer himself, however, restated how important gaming was to the future of AMD. His goal didn’t appear to be backing down from Nvidia as a whole, but to take an approach that leans on AMD’s strengths at offering better mid-tier options. On that note, Huynh said there’s plenty to be excited about in the future for AMD graphics cards.
The current reporting on when the next-gen RDNA 4 discrete GPUs will launch is oscillating between late 2024 or early 2025.
Hearing that will no doubt frustrate some AMD fans. We all want to see Nvidia have some proper performance competition, and that feels impossible without a GPU that can compete with Nvidia’s best. Huynh’s position is that “playing king of the hill” is fun, but it didn’t end up increasing AMD’s market share last time around. It wasn’t ruled out entirely in the long term, but it’s not likely anytime soon.
Lastly, Huynh remained enthusiastic about the idea of bringing neural processing units to desktop chips. NPUs are increasingly becoming an important part of AMD’s latest mobile chips and have even showed up in the company’s desktop APUs. But Huynh said that NPUs are also on their way to the company’s flagship gaming chips in the future.
It might not seem like NPUs would serve much purpose there, especially if it means having to reduce gaming performance, but Huynh says AMD is committed to doing the legwork required to help developers actually utilize them. There’s even a gaming application, according to Huynh, particularly in freeing up the GPU from some tasks to increase frame rates. He stated his strong commitment to not letting the NPU result in less CPU performance for gamers, even if it meant AMD eating the cost.
Huynh says AMD has already been in active talks with major developers like Epic and Activision, and while he says there’s been some hesitancy from developers, he seemed confident that the NPU will eventually take.
