AMD’s Software Stack Optimization Process is the Reason Why You Won’t See RX 9000 GPUs Before March
AMD’s decision to delay the launch of RDNA 4 GPUs may not be entirely due to NVIDIA launching the RTX 5070 in March. While it could be one of the primary reasons for scheduling the RX 9000 launch in March, it’s not the only one as AMD claims that they need to work on the software side a bit more.
The Vice President and General Manager of Radeon Graphics at AMD just announced that they are working on the software stack to optimize the performance of Radeon RX 9000 GPUs. If you are aware, AMD has already unveiled their first two cards at CES but hasn’t lifted the embargo on the reviews or retail launch. The board partners are already well-equipped and some have started listing their GPUs on retailers.
As per David’s post, with the optimization of the software stack, not only the RX 9000 GPUs will offer optimal gaming performance but will also help developers enable FSR 4 into their titles. This means AMD is currently focusing on the back-end stuff, including Adrenalin software for users and AMD GPUOpen to integrate FSR 4 into the game pipeline by the developers.
Apart from optimizing the software stack, AMD is on its course of supplying the chips to its board partners. We have already seen several AIBs unveiling their custom Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 GPUs a few weeks back and as per AMD, we should be seeing more board partners coming with their own custom editions at the time of launch. This will be extremely crucial because availability can be one of the biggest advantages of a GPU maker that NVIDIA is said to be lacking with its higher-end RTX 50 series GPUs at the moment.
Expect Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 to launch around the same time when NVIDIA launches RTX 5070 but the 60 and 50 class cards based on RDNA 4 architecture will follow up later.