MSI confirms it won't make any Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs, RDNA 4 officially abandoned

It's not often you see a massive graphics card partner exit from the GPU market, with the last big exit in recent memory being EVGA in 2022. Now MSI can be added to that list, but just for Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards.

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In a recent statement to Tom's Hardware, MSI has confirmed it will not be manufacturing any graphics card based on AMD's RDNA 4 architecture, which means the company will be skipping out on the entire line-up of RX 9000-series graphics cards.

The partnership between MSI and AMD isn't completely dissolved, as the company will keep the door open for future collaborations, but nothing will be manufactured for this current generation. For comparison, MSI manufactured 45 models of AMD's RDNA 2 generation or the RX 6000-series graphics card. As for the RDNA 3, or the RX 7000-series, MSI only made four models, which equates to a massive reduction of 91% between the two aforementioned generations.

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With that in mind, this decision not to make any RX 9000-series GPUs isn't totally surprising and is clearly something MSI has had planned for quite some time. But the big question is, why pull out at all? There are several factors to MSI's withdrawal, one of which is the dominance of NVIDIA GPUs, which equates to a staggering 83% of the gaming market, according to Steam's Hardware Survey.

Additionally, EVGA's exit from the graphics card market left a hole to be filled by other partners, MSI included, with another reason being the reported delays in landing an MSRP for the RX 9000-series. This reported delay resulted in problems emerging with manufacturing calculations, production planning, and shipping.

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As previously stated, the relationship between MSI and AMD isn't completely dissolved, and perhaps we will see a return of MSI AMD-based GPUs in the future when AMD re-enters the higher-end market with its UDNA architecture. For the time being, the withdrawal of MSI opens up an opportunity for other partners, such as Acer, which has recently been increasing its AMD-based graphics card offerings.

Ultimately, it comes down to market competition and whether or not it's worth it financially for a partner to provide options on either side of the fence. Unfortunately, for both consumers and seemingly partners, NVIDIA's dominance has made partners question whether it is really even worth providing an AMD option to consumers when NVIDIA owns more than 80% of the GPU market anyway. Partners are likely considering if the money spent on producing AMD cards could be better utilized elsewhere, whether it be in producing more NVIDIA cards or another aspect of the business.

In a nutshell, if NVIDIA and AMD were neck and neck with performance/price, it'd benefit every partner to provide options for both sides, as both sides would be selling equally. However, that simply isn't the case right now.