AMD reportedly has no plan to use its new RDNA 4 gaming GPU architecture for the integrated graphics in its new Ryzen CPUs. After being really impressed by the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, we were hoping the company’s new GPU architecture could be used as the foundation for a new, smaller GPU inside the company’s chips, but it looks as though that’s not going to happen.
As we found in our AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT review, the company has made great strides with its latest RDNA 4 GPU architecture. With its massively improved ray tracing performance, as well as the vastly superior image quality of FSR 4, this new AMD GPU went straight to the top of our guide to the best graphics card, but it looks as though this new GPU architecture isn’t going to move into the company’s next-gen CPUs.
This latest rumor comes from a post on X (formerly Twitter) by regular tech leaker Kepler_L2, after looking at the Github code for AMD’s latest GPUOpen drivers for its APUs in the Vulkan graphics API. Crucially, there’s a section referring to Gfxlp12 (referring to RDNA 4), which is followed by “// dGPU only,” where the “d” is presumably short for “discrete.”
The implication here is that RDNA 4 is only going to be used in discrete GPUs, unlike RDNA 2 (GfxIp10_3), RDNA 3 (GfxIp11_0), and RDNA 3.5 (GfxIp11_5), which can all be called by the driver. “No RDNA 4 APUs,” says Kepler_L2, followed by a thinking emoji.
While this is potentially disappointing news, it wouldn’t surprise me if AMD decided to skip RDNA 4 for its next-gen CPUs.
Historically, AMD’s accelerated processing units (APUs) with full integrated Radeon GPUs have regularly been a generation behind when it comes to GPU architecture. The Ryzen 7 5700G’s GPU was still based on the old Vega architecture when it was released, despite AMD already having RDNA 2 gaming GPUs such as the Radeon RX 6800 XT.
With AMD also moving to its new UDNA architecture in the future, which unifies its gaming and enterprise architectures under one roof, the company has probably decided it would be more efficient to wait for its next-gen GPU before it makes any radical changes to its CPU designs.
That said, the new AMD Strix Halo platform has now shown the potential for integrated graphics if AMD goes all out on the GPU design, and it would be great to see what one of these chips could do with the RDNA 4 architecture under its belt.
If you’re looking to buy a new processor now, check out our guide to the best gaming CPU, where you’ll find all our current recommendations, and you can also read our Ryzen 5 8600G review, where we take a look at one of AMD’s latest desktop CPUs with integrated Radeon graphics.
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