I was excited to head into 2024. With a variety of releases scheduled for the second half of the year, 2024 was shaping up to be a great time for PC hardware. After all, AMD, Nvidia, and Intel are all rumored to be launching new products, and you know what that means: intense competition for the right to dominate the rankings of the best graphics cards and processors.
We’re well into the second half of the year and the rumors are getting a lot more pessimistic than they used to be. I’m no different. With looming delays and ongoing Intel CPU instability issues, 2024 may be a completely bleak year for PC hardware enthusiasts.
AMD might wait for RDNA 4
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
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First, a rumor that’s been repeated so many times that it feels almost confirmed, AMD doesn’t manufacture any high-end GPUs with RDNA 4, so beating Nvidia seems like a pipe dream. In fact, it won’t even beat the performance of the company’s current-generation flagship RX 7900 XTX. Various leakers have pointed out that the Navi 48 GPU’s performance will be close to the RX 7900 XT, but some say that ray tracing might be better.
Still, even if this is true, AMD scaling back a bit wouldn’t hurt. In fact, it might be for the best, given that gaming revenues have plummeted and they never really had a product that could compete with Nvidia’s RTX 5090. I’m okay with the reality that Nvidia will remain on top for the time being.
The success of a GPU depends on more than just its pure performance. Timing and price are also important, and AMD can certainly compete on both fronts. This is almost a given, as AMD cards have historically been cheaper than Nvidia’s. Timing also appears to have worked in AMD’s favor.
Early leaks had AMD anticipating the launch of the Radeon RX 8000 series in Q4 2024. With Nvidia only rumored to launch the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 in 2024, AMD would dominate the mainstream GPU market. A launch between September and November would have left AMD with few next-gen competitors for several months. Let’s not forget that the holiday season is a very good time to sell anything, including PC hardware.
Unfortunately, it looks like AMD may forego holiday sales and push back the launch of RDNA 4 to the first few months of 2025. Hardware leaker Kepler_L2 has stated that the flagship Navi 48 will be unveiled during CES 2025, followed by the lower-priced Navi 44 in Q2 2025.
This is just a rumor, like everything else related to RDNA 4. Still, if this turns out to be true, delaying the launch of RDNA 4 would have cost AMD a good opportunity to beat Nvidia… if not for the fact that the RTX 50 series could also be delayed.
Will Nvidia really delay the launch of the RTX 50 series?
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
Nvidia fans are relieved of the worries that plague AMD enthusiasts: Nvidia will almost certainly continue to dominate the high-end GPU market, perhaps with the RTX 5090 on the way, and perhaps with new ones on the way. The Titan AI GPU will likely be as powerful (and expensive) as we’d expect.
But the question is, when will Nvidia launch the RTX 50 series? Everyone thought it would be this year, but now it seems that may not be the case.
In recent months, leakers have said Nvidia plans to launch it in 2024, with some reports saying the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 will launch later this year. The mid-range part of the lineup, starting with the RTX 5070, was said to follow in 2025. That makes sense considering Nvidia has a two-year release cycle. The RTX 20-series launched in September 2018, followed by the RTX 30-series in September 2020 and the RTX 40-series in October 2022. So, a launch date around September or October this year would have been in line with Nvidia’s usual schedule.
I don’t think the RTX 50 will arrive until CES.
— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) July 22, 2024
There was no reason to suspect that Nvidia would follow its usual pattern, but now two leakers have provided information that the RTX 50 series may be delayed. Kopite7kimi on X (formerly Twitter) was the first to say that Nvidia wouldn’t talk about its next-generation GPUs until CES, which won’t take place until January 2025. YouTuber RedGamingTech agreed, citing his own sources.
Why did Nvidia choose to delay the launch of its graphics cards? Like AMD, the decision seems bad from a marketing perspective, as the end of the year is one of the best times for GPU sales. On the other hand, a company as powerful as Nvidia could ignore seasonality and drive sales through brand recognition alone, regardless of the season.
There have been hints that, unlike AMD, Nvidia may not be in a rush to launch the RTX 50 series. Moore’s Law Is Dead reported a few months ago that Nvidia was hyping the RTX 50 series at CES and could technically release the GPUs in 2024, but might wait until 2025.
Despite the above, I was fully expecting some exciting new Nvidia cards to arrive later this year. Now, it may be late January or February before they hit the market. Nothing is certain at this point, but the longer Nvidia remains silent, the more likely it is that the delay is real. September and October aren’t that far away, but we’ve still not heard anything about Blackwell graphics cards.
Battlemage? Who’s a battlemage?
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
The rumor mill has been buzzing with information about new products from Nvidia and AMD, as well as new Intel CPUs, but things have often been quiet when it comes to Intel’s discrete GPUs. Leakers like Moore’s Law Is Dead and RedGamingTech have said they haven’t heard much about Battlemage, so it all seems a bit up in the air.
The little bits of news we hear often aren’t very good. Moore’s Law Is Dead said a few months ago that Intel would stop making discrete Battlemage cards for laptops, instead focusing on Xe2 integrated graphics for laptops, and that desktops would have discrete Battlemage. We’ve also heard that Battlemage may be significantly cut compared to previous speculation.
In a recent video, RedGamingTech said that the Battlemage die is expected to be two, with the flagship model only featuring 32 Xe cores, the same number as the Arc A770. Additionally, Intel is said to be sticking with GDDR6 memory (like AMD), meaning this GPU will once again be overtaken by its current-gen competitors. Price is Intel’s saving grace, but it won’t be a problem if the timing is right. But is there still hope for Intel to get that “right timing” before things get bad?
Red Gaming Tech
Intel’s Tom Petersen was fairly cautious, but also optimistic, when talking about Battlemage in an interview at CES 2024. Petersen said that most of the work that was being done on Battlemage in January was on the software side, with most of the hardware team moving over to Celestial. Alchemist had a lot of driver issues initially, so it was smart for Intel to spend so much time on the software side. To their credit, Intel did a great job of resolving those issues, and the GPU is stable now. But it still lags far behind its current-gen competitors, let alone the next generation.
There are rumors floating around that Intel is trying to launch Battlemage before Black Friday in time for the holidays. At this point, it’s hard to know what to believe. Intel could get Battlemage on store shelves this year and make sales they wouldn’t have otherwise, with AMD and Nvidia lagging behind. So there’s every reason for Intel to give it a shot.
It’s not just GPUs
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
I won’t beat around the bush, but graphics cards have been pretty underwhelming this year. Sure, January saw a refresh of the RTX 40 series, but late 2024 may be a total disappointment. Unfortunately, GPUs aren’t the only problem.
Gamers, game developers, and even server hosts are plagued by crashes on Intel’s 13th and 14th generation CPUs. The problem seems to be on the rise, and until recently Intel has been mostly silent on the issue, and despite recommendations to avoid BIOS updates and overclocking, many CPUs (mainly Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K) are crashing. Now Intel has issued an update, but so far there is no obvious fix.
Meanwhile, AMD seems to be trying to avoid the same fate as Intel: the company announced that it will delay the launch of its upcoming Zen 5 processors by up to two weeks, pushing the launch dates from July 31 to August 8 and August 15. AMD is recalling CPUs that have already been shipped, including those that have already been shipped to system providers.
It’s unclear why AMD is delaying the launch of their Ryzen 9000 CPUs, but it’s unlikely to be as serious as the issues Intel is having, which will obviously take more than two weeks to resolve. However, the CPU market hasn’t been doing so well lately, with instability on Intel’s side and delays on AMD’s side.
It’s not time to despair yet – 2024 may bring some exciting new product releases – but we’re not as sure as we were when the year first began, and it would certainly be disappointing to see an entire year go by without a promising new generation of GPUs being released.
