Here’s why AMD’s RX 9000 GPUs were a no-show at CES

For weeks and months, we were waiting for Nvidia and AMD to announce their much-awaited RTX 5000 and RX 9000 series GPUs (changed from RX 8000) respectively. While Team Green stole the show with its Blackwell announcement, AMD’s RDNA 4 GPUs announcement was conspicuously absent from its livestream. The company talked about everything from its new Ryzen AI mobile processors and Ryzen Z2 series handheld CPUs to Ryzen 9000 HX processors with 3D V-Cache.

The announcement many gamers were looking for, however, never surfaced as the 45-minute event came and went. As expected, media outlets inquired about the omission, especially since AMD had briefed them on RDNA 4 prior to the session. Surprisingly, AMD was forthcoming about the reasons the stream omitted the RX 9000 cards, and what a proper announcement at a later date will accomplish.

AMD didn’t have enough time to do RX 9000 justice

It kinda makes sense

You might think that omitting such an important announcement at the last minute, one that was included in the press briefing, points to something being awfully wrong behind the scenes, but AMD wants to put all those rumors to rest. AMD’s focus on desktop, laptop, and handheld CPUs has been just as strong, if not stronger, than its focus on discrete graphics cards. In a 45-minute session, the company had to give all those new CPU announcements the time they deserved.

The fact that the company wanted to do the same for its RX 9000 GPUs is the very reason it decided to reserve the reveal for a later date instead of doing it haphazardly in 5 or 10 minutes. The company didn’t want gamers and the larger community to think that it didn’t care about RDNA 4 because it wrapped it up in 5 minutes. It wanted to do justice to its RDNA 4 architecture, FSR 4, the new product naming scheme, and more.

AMD has repeatedly claimed that it has built RDNA 4 from the ground up to focus on the largest volume segments of the market, essentially gamers looking for mid-range and more affordable graphics cards. It has also promised drastically improved ray tracing performance, plus significant machine learning & AI compute improvements on the new architecture.

Without the right amount of time spent on each of these facets of its new generation GPUs, AMD couldn’t have ensured that people walked away from the event wowed and excited about what’s to come. This is what AMD executives David McAfee and Frank Azor told a few media outlets in a small meeting, and if we take it at face value, Team Red is planning to announce some pretty powerful stuff soon.

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AMD wanted to sit back and see what Nvidia would reveal

It might have been the right call

Everyone, including AMD, knew CEO Jensen Huang would announce Nvidia’s new Blackwell GPUs at CES. Team Red decided to wait and watch how things would play out, so that it could respond in the best way possible, and deliver something that would truly benefit gamers and the overall market. You might conclude that the decision proved right in the end, as on the surface, Nvidia delivered a great show, promising landmark gains at lower prices compared to its previous-gen offerings.

AMD now has the opportunity to iron out any kinks with its RX 9000 GPUs, give them some final touches in terms of the drivers and prices, and refine its communication to nail the positioning. The initial marketing of any new product does most of the heavy lifting in its success, and AMD hasn’t exactly been stellar at it in the past.

With a much more promising product in the oven, a clear intent to compete in the mid-range segment, and a lot more information on the competition, Team Red can now put its best foot forward. I’m especially excited to see the ray tracing and FSR improvements the company can deliver with this generation, the latter of which is already looking quite promising in the previews we’ve seen on several media outlets.

AMD has also claimed that the performance leaks being circulated around the internet don’t reflect the final performance of its RX 9000 cards, since no one has the latest RDNA 4 drivers, not even board partners. If whatever we’ve seen from the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 performance leaks is anywhere close to the truth, Nvidia will have a fight on its hands.

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AMD’s RX 9000 announcement might be closer than you think

It could drop anytime

AMD has been open about not making the same mistake it did with the RX 7000 launch — taking too long to roll out the entire series while Nvidia beat them to the punch. The company has said that its latest chips are hitting all the right performance and power targets in the lab, and several board partners have already shown off the new RDNA 4 GPUs at CES.

So, when can we expect the company to formally announce the RX 9070 XT, RX 9070, and possibly other SKUs? Well, the answer might lie in a leak shared by a source on the YouTube channel Moore’s Law is Dead, which claims that AMD is planning to unveil the GPUs on or around January 15th. AMD hasn’t officially announced a date yet, sharing only a broad “Q1” timeline for the launch, but this unexpected announcement might make sense, if only to steal some of the spotlight from the RTX 50 series.

Another rumor posted on Chiphell claims that the review embargo for the RX 9000 cards will lift around January 22nd, which further leads credence to the mid-January announcement date. AMD might not want to wait until the RTX 50 series reviews start clogging up your feeds, planning to offer RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 units to reviewers in advance for third-party benchmarks to roll in before the month ends.

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Whenever it comes out, AMD’s RX 9000 has me excited

I was looking forward to Nvidia’s RTX 50 series announcement, if only to see whether the company would raise prices again and what kind of performance uplift it would offer compared to the RTX 4000. We got the answer to one of those things (the raw performance is still up in the air), but the hope of comparing RTX 5000 with AMD’s RX 9000 series didn’t come true at CES.

In a strategic move, Team Red decided to wait and watch what the competition brings to the table, and give RDNA 4 its proper due in a separate announcement. That event might be closer than many would have thought, and we might soon be able to see if AMD’s claims of offering improved performance at affordable prices are indeed true.