AMD’s wins, fails, and WTF moments of 2024

No doubt about it, AMD had a very good year.

Our recap of AMD’s highs, lows, and head-scratching moments of 2024 doesn’t reveal too many mistakes. At times, Intel stumbled through 2024 like someone coming home from the pub on Christmas Eve. But AMD was steady, reliable, and mostly dependable.

See if you agree with us as we walk through the best and worst of AMD’s 2024, as we’ve done (or will do) for Microsoft, Google, and Intel. Will AMD be able to keep up the pace in 2025?

AMD Ryzen 8000: FAIL

Calling this family a failure may seem a hit harsh, but it’s true that this was one of the few missteps by AMD all year. The Ryzen 8000 family fell a bit short on a few fronts: First, it was entirely made up of APUs, with no cheaper options without integrated graphics. For desktop gamers who favor graphics cards, that’s just wasted silicon. Second, while the chips offered AI capabilities, they fell short of Copilot+ PC status — and again, gamers have always been a bit suspicious of AI. The Ryzen 8000 also began shipping a few months after its announcement.

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At the time, Intel’s 14th-gen Core chips were delivering impressive performance with less care paid to battery life. And since the Ryzen 8000 was announced at the same time as the Ryzen 5000 series, it felt like people just stopped talking about the Zen 4-based 8000 and wondered when the Zen 5-based 9000 series would appear.

AMD Ryzen 5700X3D: WIN

It’s probably fair to say that the Ryzen 8000 was overshadowed by the 5700X3D, too, which was announced alongside it.

One of AMD’s most attractive characteristics is the longevity of its platforms, and the Ryzen 8000 was designed around the AM5 socket. The Ryzen 5700X3D had two things going for it: First, it was yet another processor on the venerable AM4 socket, allowing customers to extend their PCs a bit longer; and second, by then the X3D’s monstrous cache had become a fan favorite. While I don’t have any numbers on how the 5700X3D sold, my guess is that it was a more appealing part than the Ryzen 8000 APUs.

It has to be noted, though, that the 5700X3D was a Zen 3 part, with slower clock speeds that pushed down productivity performance. For gamers, though, the Ryzen 5700X3D was just what they asked for.

AMD’s mainstream GPU strategy: WIN

AMD’s GPU business in 2024 and 2025 will be guided by this storyline: Nvidia has won the high-end GPU market, and everyone else is chasing the scraps. That’s not totally true, but close enough! AMD’s senior vice president Jack Huynh revealed AMD’s new direction in September, explaining that he’d rather chase 80 percent of the lower-cost, mainstream market than the top 20 percent, or the premium offerings.

Thiago Trevisan / IDG

Since we don’t know what AMD has up its sleeve for 2025, we can’t be sure if AMD will hold to this price/performance strategy or not. Keep in mind, though, that AMD has found a comfortable little niche, with minority positions in CPUs and GPUs, but also enterprise CPUs, graphics, and AI. The profit margins that AMD has for products in the latter three categories help offset the challenges of competing in the PC space.

AMD’s GPU pricing strategy: WIN

It hasn’t been easy, though, and February’s launch of the rival Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 for $169 was evidence of that. Nvidia is expected to launch consumer versions of its “Blackwell” architecture (the GeForce 5000 family) in 2025, most likely at CES with eye-popping specs and prices. But there’s a risk that it could just drop an update to an older architecture to essentially torpedo AMD’s ambitions.

AMD (and its customers) have been willing to adjust pricing, however, to their credit. AMD’s partner, Sapphire, dropped the price of the Radeon 7900XT card by $200 in February, probably to compete with new “Super” versions of Nvidia’s cards.

Radeon Link, RIP: FAIL

In January, AMD ended support for the Radeon Link mobile app, which allowed gamers to stream games from PCs with Radeon graphics cards to phones and tablets running with Android or iOS.

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AMD’s right in that there are numerous other ways to stream games, including Microsoft’s own Xbox application, as well as portable PCs. Still, its a shame to take a tried-and-true solution and just ditch it wholesale.

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.1: WIN

While AMD’s partners should be applauded for making pricing adjustments, there’s a bit of subtext to all of this, too: The hardware doesn’t always determine how a game will play. We’ve known for some time that driver improvements will push frames higher, but so too will some of the most revolutionary technologies in the past few years: graphics upscaling and frame generation. In March, AMD debuted AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.1 (FSR 3.1), an improved version of its FidelityFX 3.0 technology.

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FSR 3.1 decouples upscaling from frame generation, an interesting tweak. FSR can boost frame rates by up to three times in games like Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut. That’s substantial. But AMD also promised FSR would be coming to 40 games when FSR 3.1 was announced in March. It’s now December, and AMD lists 36 (between FSR2 and FSR3) on its games page.

AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2.0: WIN

While FSR began as an upscaling technology, AMD’s Fluid Motion Frames was always a way to smooth frame rates by interjecting new (some call these “fake” frames) in between the frames the game asks for. While this technically boosts frame rates, its goal is to actually provide smoother gameplay. AMD began 2024 by basically making FMF 1.0 available to all DirectX games; in October, AMD debuted FMF 2.0 as well.

The problem within frame generation is that those extra frames introduce latency, another thing that gamers tend to avoid. FMF 2.0 is specifically designed to reduce latency by using AI (of course). Fortunately, it’s applicable to both AMD’s integrated graphics as well as RX 6000- and RX 7000-series GPUs.

AMD’s handheld dominance: WIN

I don’t own a handheld gaming PC, and my wife would probably start screaming at me if I brought it up, using words like “mortgage” and “vacation money” and “the price of eggs.” Anyway, if you are in the market for a handheld PC, it’s a virtual lock that an AMD processor is inside.

PCWelt/Asus/Amazon

2024 may have been an off year for consoles — which use AMD chips, too, by the way. But the resurgence of portable PCs has meant renewed interest in AMD’s Z-series processors: The Z1 and the Z1 Extreme. (The Z2 may debut at CES.) Basically, it’s news any time a handheld doesn’t use an AMD chip inside.

Microsoft passes over AMD for Surface: FAIL

This year, 2024, was the year of the Copilot+ PC and especially Windows on Arm. AMD has always struggled somewhat to attract customers in the mobile space, and this year numerous PC makers signed up to manufacture at least one PC designed around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite platform.

In 2019, AMD cracked Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 3 with a custom-designed Ryzen processor, and Microsoft and AMD maintained a fairly steady relationship. But in 2024 Surface sold out wholesale to the Snapdragon, and AMD was left out in the cold. If Qualcomm can keep up its combination of long battery life and decent computing performance, AMD could be pushed aside.