Skip to main content

AMD’s graphics card sales just took a nosedive

RX 7900 XTX installed in a test bench.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

AMD may make some of the best graphics cards you can buy, but they aren’t selling well. In its financial results for the first quarter of 2024,  AMD shared that gaming revenue was down 33% compared to the previous quarter, and down 48% compared to the same point last year.

In total, AMD brought in $922 million in its gaming segment in the first quarter. For reference, in Nvidia’s previous revenue report, it reported $2.9 billion for its gaming segment. AMD attributes the drop in revenue to “a decrease in semi-custom revenue and lower AMD Radeon GPU sales.”

Recommended Videos

The latter half of that explanation speaks for itself, but the decrease in semi-custom revenue is interesting. AMD is the driving force behind most gaming devices outside of a PC, including the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC handhelds like the Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go. As these devices start to age, AMD is likely feeling the impact of lower sales.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

Graphics cards also play a big role here, however. At the beginning of the year, AMD released the RX 7600 XT, which wasn’t received well. In our RX 7600 XT review, we wrote: “The RX 7600 XT comes in at an affordable price, and with an impressive memory spec in tow, but it doesn’t put up the numbers to justify its spot among budget-focused GPUs.”

The RX 7600 XT graphics card on a pink background.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

By contrast, Nvidia launched its RTX 40-series Super refresh at the beginning of the year, bringing some much-needed updates to three of Nvidia’s higher-end models and maintaining the critical breakpoints in price from $600 up. Unlike the previous generation, we haven’t seen a refresh from AMD this year, with the company instead relying on discounts on older GPUs like the RX 7900 XT. That’s good news for gamers, but clearly bad news for AMD’s graphics business.

Discussing the revenue, Jean Hu, wxecutive vice president of AMD, said the following as reported by Wccftech: “We actually think the second half [of the year] will be lower than first half. That’s basically how we’re looking at this year for the gaming business. And at the same time, Gaming’s gross margin is lower than our company average … Q2 game is down a lot.”

An AMD Ryzen CPU socketed in a motherboard.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

Although gaming revenue took a big hit, AMD is optimistic, and that mainly comes down to new Strix Halo CPUs. AMD reconfirmed that these laptop chips are arriving in the second half of the year and, according to AMD CE Lisa Su, it will mark a big turning point: “The AI PC products, when we look at the Strix products, it’s — they’re really well-suited for the premium segments of the market. And I think that’s where you’re going to see some of the AI PC content strongest in the beginning.”

Based on rumors surrounding Strix Halo chips, they look extremely powerful. Some early leaks suggest that the APUs could boast power on the same level as a PS5, and in something that could comfortably fit in a laptop. AMD hasn’t been shy about Strix Halo up to this point, so we’ll likely hear official details on the range soon.

Jacob Roach
Lead Reporter, PC Hardware
Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D is official, and it shakes things up in a big way
Pads on the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

We all knew it was coming. A string of rumors over the past several months has pointed to AMD releasing the Ryzen 7 9800X3D on November 7, but the company itself just confirmed the new CPU. It's looking for a spot among the best processors, packing 3D V-Cache on top of an eight-core Zen 5 CPU in order to improve gaming performance.

True to rumors we've seen this week, AMD is pricing the CPU at $479, which is nearly $30 more expensive than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. AMD claims that the new chip provides an average gaming increase of 8% over the last-gen CPU, and 20% faster gaming performance compared to Intel's recent Core Ultra 9 285K. In addition, AMD says that minimum frame rates are up, with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D improving 1% lows in The Last of Us Part One by 31%.

Read more
AMD RDNA 4: everything we know so far about the RX 8000 series
AMD RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT graphics cards.

AMD's RDNA 4 graphics cards (also referred to as the Radeon RX 8000 series) are already on the horizon, but they're still a bit of a mystery. Fortunately, various leakers break up that silence with plenty of rumors and tantalizing speculation.

Most likely set to launch in early 2025, RDNA 4 GPUs may give Nvidia a run for its money, but will they be able to compete against some of the best graphics cards from the upcoming RTX 50-series? This is one of the few things that leakers all agree on, and we'll tell you all about it in our full roundup of RDNA 4 news below.
RDNA 4: specs

Read more
AMD CEO teases RDNA 4 release as gaming revenue drops by 69%
AMD CEO Lisa Su delivering AMD's CES 2023 keynote.

There's been a lot of speculation about the potential release date for AMD's upcoming RDNA 4 graphics cards. Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, has just put an end to most of these claims. While initial predictions pinned AMD's future best graphics cards at the end of 2024, AMD now confirms that RDNA 4 is on track to launch in early 2025. This announcement arrives alongside a steep decrease in AMD's gaming revenue.

AMD has been quiet about RDNA 4 (or RX 8000 series) for months, but we've seen many reports from various leakers who had something to say about the potential release date for these next-gen GPUs. At the beginning of 2024, these claims were fairly optimistic, with some leakers claiming that the AMD Radeon RX 8000 series might launch as early as this summer. That  did not happen, and as the months went by, many of them adopted a more conservative release window sometime in 2025. Now, thanks to AMD's third-quarter earnings call, we know that those later claims were correct.

Read more