AMD revealed its fourth-quarter incomes the other day, and the numbers were primarily rosy: $7.7 billion in income and a 51 percent earnings margin, compared to $6.2 billion and 47 percent a year earlier. The most significant winner was the information center department, that made $3.9 billion thanks to Epyc server processors and Instinct AI accelerators, and Ryzen CPUs are likewise offering well, assisting the business’s customer section make $2.3 billion.

If you were looking for a dark area, you ‘d discover it in the business’s video gaming department, which made a fairly little $563 million, down 59 percent from a year earlier. AMD’s Lisa Su blamed this on both devoted graphics card sales and sales from the business’s “semi-custom” chips (that is, the ones produced particularly for video game consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation).

Other information sources recommend that the reaction from GPU purchasers to AMD’s Radeon RX 7000 series, released in between late 2022 and early 2024, has actually been dull. The Steam Hardware Survey, a loud however broadly helpful barometer for GPU market share, reveals no RX 7000-series designs in the leading 50; just 2 of the GPUs (the 7900 XTX and 7700 XT) are utilized in sufficient video gaming PCs to be pointed out on the list at all, with the others all getting lumped into the “other” classification. Jon Peddie Research just recently approximated that AMD was offering approximately one devoted GPU for each 7 or 8 offered by Nvidia.

Hope springs everlasting. Su validated on AMD’s revenues call that the brand-new Radeon RX 9000-series cards, revealed at CES last month, would be releasing in early March. The Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT are both intended towards the middle of the graphics card market, and Su stated that both would bring “high-quality gaming to mainstream players.”

A chance, possibly

“Mainstream” might suggest a great deal of things. AMD’s CES slide deck placed the 9070 series along with Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti ($799) and 4070 Super ($599) and its own RTX 7900 XT, 7900 GRE, and 7800 XT (in between $500 and $730 since this writing), a quite broad cost spread that is still more pricey than a whole high-end console. The GPUs might still rely greatly on upscaling algorithms like AMD’s Fidelity Super Resolution (FSR) to strike playable frame rates at those resolutions, instead of targeting native 4K.