For the first quarter of 2024, AMD said that its gaming revenues were down a massive 48% compared to the same period in 2023. While some of that fall reflects an inevitable cyclical downturn in revenues from games consoles—put simply, the consoles have been out for a while and sales are beginning to flag—AMD also conceded that
Meanwhile, games consoles aren't looking all that healthy, either. Microsoft says Xbox sales are down by 31% for its most recent reported quarter and the company's future expectations for console sales are pretty pessimistic, too. With all that in mind, rumours that AMD has ditched all plans for high-end members of its upcoming next-gen RDNA 4 GPU range make sense. Why bother with all the investment when nobody is going to buy the GPUs anyway, especially now that cryptocurrency miners can't be relied on to mop up a whole load of cards?
Not so for an AMD GPU's ray tracing prowess. The hardware is what it is and driver optimisations aren't going to close the huge hardware gap to Nvidia in that area. It's notable in this context that Nvidia's efforts with its AI GPUs do seem to be relevant for its gaming chips, too. Nvidia invests megabucks in developing AI Tensor cores for its AI chips, as used by all the latest large language AI models. Then those Tensor cores get dropped in gaming chips and help make Nvidia's DLSS upscaling clearly better than AMD's non-AI FSR.