CES 2025 has come along to kickstart the year with a handful of new hardware launches. One of the first major keynotes on the schedule is AMD and you can watch Team Red’s presentation right here (Nvidia is hosting theirs a little later). Now with the announcements official, we can confirm that the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT are AMD’s two latest graphics cards.
You may notice that the naming scheme is different, yet familiar. On top of that, the last generation of Radeon cards was the 7000 series, so it looks like the 8000 series has been ignored completely. Well, there’s some explaining to do – so we can reveal why Radeon branding has changed for the new RDNA 4 line-up.
New AMD Radeon GPUs have a naming scheme that is similar to Nvidia
There are a couple of reasons why AMD has opted to rebrand its new Radeon cards. This is explained in the slide below and reveals that they want to simplify the model names to “match [with its] direct competitor” Nvidia.
Additionally, by moving straight up to 9000, the series is now in line with the other major side of AMD’s business, CPUs. In fact, both the 9900X3D and 9950X3D have also been unveiled at CES 2025 and will aim to build upon the success of the 9800X3D.
Now that the new desktop GPUs are synced up with the current-gen gaming CPUs, that leaves the RX 8000 series for mobile devices using RDNA 3.5 architecture, though we’re yet to see how these will shape up performance-wise. AMD has introduced three new mobile processors, including the 9955HX3D – labeled the “world’s best gaming and content creation mobile processor”.
