AMD was meant to unveil its new RDNA 4-powered Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs at CES 2025 last week, but delayed the unveiling... which is now being called a tactical move, to hurt NVIDIA's impending GeForce RTX 50 series GPU launch.

In a new post on Chiphell, user "nApolean" said that this was a planned move by AMD, as they were waiting to see what NVIDIA was going to do with its GeForce RTX 50 series "Blackwell" unveil, and then come back with a bigger, and badder response.
The only option AMD has here is to absolutely nail the lower-end and mid-range markets with its new RDNA 4 GPU, where we could see the flagship Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card somewhere in the $500 to $700 range. NVIDIA has a starting price of just $549 for its new GeForce RTX 5070 graphics card, which the company says has "RTX 4090" levels of performance (with DLSS, etc enabled).
AMD's new RDNA 4-based Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card saw performance that would best the RTX 4080 SUPER in early 3DMark testing, with a 330W TDP and 16GB of GDDR6 memory. The leaked ASUS Radeon RX 9070 XT had a base GPU clock of 2520MHz and a boost clock of 3060MHz, beating the RTX 4080 SUPER in TimeSpy Extreme tests.
Maybe we'll see an insanely competitive -- like almost throw-away pricing -- on the Radeon RX 9070 XT with performance that sits at around the RTX 4080 SUPER, RTX 4080, RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5070 levels of performance.

Could AMD have planned the RDNA 4 announcement at CES 2025 because it has a trick up its sleeve? No. But, it could've been a bullet the company was meant to take -- bailing on the Radeon RX 9000 series GPU unveiling at CES 2025 -- to wait to see how competitive NVIDIA would be with its new GeForce RTX 50 series.
- Read more: AMD says 'King of the Hill' GPU strategy hasn't worked: RDNA 4 mainstream only, no high-end GPU
Knowing, and already admitting it has bailed on the high-end GPU market... it didn't matter what AMD did, it wasn't going to beat the huge RTX 50 series announcement. RDNA 4's unveiling was pulled, but I don't think this was premeditated. I think AMD teased the RDNA 4 unveiling knowing it wasn't going to happen, gauging reaction of not just delaying the unveiling of RDNA 4, and to gauge the reaction of PC gamers and their thoughts on the RTX 50 series.
At this point, AMD would need to sell Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs at a loss -- take the hit, knowing Ryzen, EPYC, consoles, etc are making them money -- and nail the mid-range GPU market with better RDNA 4 offerings than last-gen Ada Lovelace GPUs. Improved ray tracing support, FSR 4 upscaling, improvements in multiple areas are coming with RDNA 4, and they'll offer better experiences than last-gen GPUs.
AMD isn't going to the high-end, and won't come close to the RTX 5080... never settle? Now it's yeah, we'll settle (for the mid-range GPU market) with RDNA 4.