A ton of big bang news were announced by AMD at CES 2025 but in this post, we’ll be focusing on the things that will elevate your gaming experience one way or another so let’s dive into all the new hardware revealed over there.
Ryzen 9 9950X3D/9900X3D for ultimate desktop gaming performance
First up, we have the Ryzen 9 9000 series X3D processors and if you already knew that the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is so good that demands are through the roof suffocating its poor supply, then the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D will be smashing records at even higher numbers.
Given a 16C32T for the 9950X3D and 12C24T for the 9900X3D respectively, they incorporate 3D-stacked SRAM on one of their two dies, which significantly boosts gaming performance albeit only in “supported” titles that can really utilize these cache. Speaking of the 2nd-gen 3D V-Cache technology, the 9800X3D has 104MB and with these new chips placed at 140MB/144MB respectively, the improvements are mild so expect only a few percentage of deviation between the “old” and “new”.
However, official benchmarks puts the 9950X3D at 20% better in a total of 40 games versus the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K. Poor Team Blue taking some shots once again.
Aside from the Q1 release timeframe, there’s not much Team Red has disclosed, including the supposedly matching yet lacking benchmark numbers for the 9900X3D as well as the prices they are going for. A quick reminder that the 9800X3D’s SRP is at US$480 so a 500+ starting price tag feels like a logital nail in the coffin.
Radeon RX 9000 Series GPUs – RDNA 4-powered visuals and AI workloads
For the GPU department, we have the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 being showcased for the very first time, slated for the same release time frame as the above-mentioned CPUs. While there’s absolute certainty that these RDNA 4 cards won’t be fighting head to head against the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs, at least they will be giving the 40 series a run for their money in terms of VRAM where AMD has traditionally given a heap ton of it even in mid range offerings.
They also slightly revamped its naming scheme from this generation onwards for better clarity which is nice for non-tech-savvy consumers out there. The RDNA 4 architecture represents a notable evolution over RDNA 3, featuring optimizations for increased instructions per clock and higher clock speeds thanks to TSMC’s 4nm fabrication process packing 3rd gen RT accelerators + 2nd gen AI accelerators for even stronger AI performance. Notably, Team Red is playing the Team Green card here as they announced its upcoming FSR 4 implementation will be exclusive to RX 9000 series cards only.
Aside from adding AI into its Software Adrenalin GPU companion software where image generation, LLM-based support chatbot, and document summarization tools are part of the initial update, AMD also teased the “Radeon RX 9060” mid-range card but we’ll know about it when it’s coming.
Ryzen Z2 Series – More fun for portable handheld PCs
The Ryzen Z1 series of APUs are quite good as they pushed portable handheld PC gaming to the mainstream so here we are – the next-gen Z2 SoCs consisting of 3 SKUs of Z2 Extreme, Z2, and Z2 Go.
For starters, the Z2 Extreme comes with an 8C16T config that boosts up to 5.0GHz, carries 24MB of cache, and 15W-35W TDP in addition to 16 RDNA 3.5 iGPU cores. And yes, these are Zen 5 cores. Now that’s lit.
On the other hand, the Z2 runs Zen-4-based 8C16T CPU cores with a 5.1GHz boost clock, 24MB of cache, 15W-30W TDP, and 12 RDNA 3 CUs. Last but not least, the Z2 Go guns for the entry-level market with its Zen 3 4C8T CPU coming in at a 4.3GHz boost clock, 10MB cache, and 15W-30W TDP to go with 12 RDNA 2 iGPU cores.
Additionally, they explained that not only do these new hardware contribute to better performance and battery life, but they also did some software work to make sure partner offerings from brands like ROG, Lenovo, ZOTAC, etc, are worth the upgrade.
A Q1 release was confirmed live on stream.
X3D tech enters the laptop gaming space
For ballers who like to game on premium gaming laptops, the new Ryzen 9000HX series processors are tasked to make that experience even better in 2025.
At here, we know that the Ryzen 9 9955HX/9850HX are the “standard” ones yet with a respectable up to 16C32T config that can boost up to 5.4GHz as well as getting up to 80MB cache and at just 54W. What’s special is the 9955HX3D being the very first mobile chip graced by the 3D-stacked cache magic to allow up to 144MB of cache. It also has 28 PCIe 5.0 lanes for GPUs and storage devices
But on paper, it seems that the difference just stops there – a simple “Yes or No” to denote the presence of the X3D cache. Therefore, the Zen 5 “Fire Range” chips will be coming to partner systems in the first half of 2025 and there’s that, as AMD has not disclose any sort of benchmark results for them just yet.
