It’s that time of year again for AMD to give us a closer look into how their business is doing as they release a financial update. One of the key takeaways from the report is that GPU sales are down. This isn’t a massive surprise considering the Steam hardware survey paints a clear picture of how they are doing versus Nvidia (it’s not great). Only the Radeon RX 7900 XTX makes much of an appearance as far as the 7000 series goes.
Despite some poor performance in the gaming sector, news that AMD is overhauling the ray tracing hardware on their next-gen graphics cards is a promising sign. If they want to compete with Nvidia, it seems like these kinds of features are a real decider for many consumers.
Radeon GPU sales have dropped
AMD recently released their Q1 2024 financial results, and there’s plenty to tuck into. One of the major things the report confirms is that GPU sales are down, as part of a decline of their ‘gaming’ revenue. AMD has long been a strong competitor, producing some of the best graphics cards today, but Nvidia remains on top and newer competition from Intel also has to be taken into account. Despite reporting that revenue is up by $5.5 billion, this is largely thanks to ‘data center’ and ‘client’ revenue, while gaming has declined by 48%.
Another thing to blame is the sharp fall in sales for the current generation of consoles such as the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, all of which use custom SOCs (system-on-a-chip) with Radeon graphics driving them. On the flipside, recent handheld gaming PCs such as the ASUS ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and the ever-relevant Steam Deck all use AMD hardware.
RDNA 4 to feature brand-new ray tracing hardware
We aren’t too far away from the RX 8000 series release date, with AMD expected to make some big announcements at Computex in early June this year. However, one rumor already points towards an overhaul of the their GPU architecture in terms of ray tracing. Prominent leaker Kepler notes that the RDNA 4 ray tracing hardware looks ‘completely different’ than RDNA 3, which was largely based on the previous generation.
Many expect the 8000 series to focus on the mid-range, rather than battling Nvidia for the top spot. With a new generation, it looks like AMD could be putting a ton of focus on closing the gap when it comes to ray tracing, as this is one area of graphics that Nvidia has safely led in for years now and one of the key selling points over Radeon alternatives.
