AMD announces next-gen Radeon RX 9070-series GPUs with AI-powered FSR 4 upscaling

AMD is previewing its next generation of GPUs at CES today, based on its latest RDNA 4 architecture that includes AI-powered FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4) upscaling. The Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 will both be available in Q1 from a variety of video card manufacturers, but AMD isn’t detailing specifications, pricing, or exact release dates just yet.

The announcement is light on concrete information. AMD says it has built this architecture from the ground up and that the GPUs built on RDNA 4 will include “a significant boost in AI.” AMD has optimized the compute units in RNDA 4, improved its ray-tracing engine and performance, and upgraded its media encoding quality. Built on a 4nm process, the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 cards will include AMD’s second-generation AI accelerators, third-generation ray-tracing accelerators, and second-generation radiance display engine.

Image: AMD

This RDNA 4 architecture will also enable AMD to launch FSR 4 with these 9000-series GPUs. FSR 4 is a machine learning-powered update to AMD’s upscaling and frame-generation technology that’s been developed specifically for RDNA 4 and its dedicated AI accelerator hardware. That means you’ll only be able to get FSR 4 with a Radeon RX 9070-series graphics card right now, and it will be supported in games with FSR 3.1 already integrated.

Matt Booty, president of game content and studios at Microsoft, appeared on stage at AMD’s CES keynote earlier today to confirm FSR 4 will be available in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 later this year.

AMD hasn’t hinted at how FSR 4 will compare to Nvidia’s DLSS technology or what type of performance uplift or image quality improvement we should expect to see with this next generation of FSR.

It’s also not clear exactly what performance the RX 9070 series of GPUs will deliver against the competition, but in a branding slide for RDNA 4, AMD appears to suggest the 9070 series will offer similar performance to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4070 Super. Nvidia is expected to announce its RTX 50-series GPUs later today.

Image: AMD

AMD is also adding new AI-powered features to its Adrenalin software. These include the ability to generate images with AI models, summarize local documents, and ask an AMD chatbot questions about graphics settings and more.

If you’re wondering why AMD has jumped from the Radeon 7000 series straight to 9000-series GPUs, the company says it will use the 8000-series branding for RDNA 3.5 mobile GPUs. AMD is only previewing FSR 4 at CES and promises to provide more details on the upscaling technology and its latest RDNA 4 GPUs ahead of the Q1 launch.