by theygamesAMD is moving its focus away from high-end GPUs in an effort to grow sales and market share. Its new AMD Radeon GPUs will instead target mid-tier and budget gamers to help challenge Nvidia’s dominance over the market. AMD confirmed the news during a question and answer session at the IFA 2024 tech showcase in Berlin.
AMD is now going to “focus on scale” in an effort to hold “40 to 50 percent” of the GPU market by moving towards cards that can benefit a bigger share of gamers, rather than focusing on enthusiasts at the top end. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, as some of the best graphics cards for budget and mid-tier gamers belong to AMD.
Jack Hunyh, a senior VP and member of the AMD leadership team, spoke in an interview with Tom’s Hardware about the new strategy. Hunyh suggests that, while AMD’s pricing already gives the company “leadership,” it needs to bring developers along to optimize games for AMD GPUs, which it can only do if AMD grows its market share. This isn’t the first time that AMD has pivoted like this, with first-gen RDNA 1 GPUs back in 2019 capping in the mid-tier, with cards like the Radeon 5700 XT, rather than trying to deliver at the top.
It’s been rumored that AMD RDNA 4 GPUs would skip the high-end market for some time, especially given the current difference between Nvidia and AMD’s tech, which has not delivered AMD the ray tracing performance it needs to be dominant at the top. While RNDA 3 GPUs like the Radeon RX 7900 GRE do perform well, AMD’s current FSR upscaling technology can’t compete with Nvidia DLSS when it comes to image quality. Nvidia’s 4000-series cards perform better in ray tracing benchmarks than AMD’s current RDNA 3 GPUs at the high end, too.
Looking at market share alone, it’s clear that AMD needs to do more to challenge Nvidia’s hold over gamers, but if its new RDNA 4 GPUs offer better bang per buck than Nvidia’s competitors at the lower end of the market, it may be able to establish a space for itself.
High-end GPUs are potentially great for AMD’s brand, but with AMD currently only commanding 12% of the market, focusing all its efforts on the largest group of gamers could help it win back some presence in the market.
AMD enthusiasts don’t need to totally panic, though, as Hyunh confirms that AMD “won’t forget the Threadrippers and the Ryzen 9’s at the top.” While he didn’t confirm it outright or elaborate on that, it does seem likely that AMD will produce high-end GPUs again at some point in the future.
Time will tell if AMD’s new RDNA 4 graphics cards successfully challenge Nvidia’s success among gamers. There’s no confirmed Radeon RX 8000 release date yet, but rumors suggest it will be early 2025 before we see them. If you can’t hold on that long, our favorite current-gen AMD GPU is still the Radeon RX 7800 XT, a great value card that doesn’t sacrifice too much performance.