In a move that could further dampen AMD’s pursuit of the discrete desktop GPU market, long-time board partner MSI has confirmed it is shifting priorities away from Radeon graphics cards to concentrate on Nvidia’s GeForce RTX lineup instead.
The announcement comes as stock of MSI’s custom Radeon RX 7000 series models dwindles, with the company stating “our focus at the moment is actually more on RTX cards” when questioned about a lack of new Radeon offerings. MSI has not released a custom AMD GPU since the RX 7600 last May.
While MSI stopped short of declaring it was entirely discontinuing Radeon graphics card production, its actions indicate it is deprioritizing AMD’s RDNA 3 lineup in favor of Nvidia’s popular RTX 40 series GPUs like the RTX 4090. MSI has already removed Radeon products from its website, and was absent from the RX 7800 XT and 7700 XT’s board partner listings.
The move represents a significant blow to AMD’s GPU division at a time when it has struggled to gain meaningful market share versus Green Team rival Nvidia. Despite fielding strong offerings like the RX 7900 XTX, AMD’s latest RDNA 3 GPUs have made little impact among gamers according to the latest Steam Hardware Survey data.
No current-gen Radeon model exceeds 0.16% usage share on the platform. In contrast, the mighty RTX 4090 alone is more popular than any single AMD GPU offering. These trends likely factor heavily into MSI’s decision to concentrate Nvidia’s typically best-selling products.
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MSI did affirm its “collaboration with AMD is essential and extremely relevant” particularly on the CPU side supporting Ryzen processors and AM5 motherboards. However, the GPU segment appears to be a different story as the company doubles down on Nvidia’s dominant position.
AMD is hardly out of the GPU race, maintaining a strong foothold in categories like handheld gaming PCs and with a rumored shift towards integrated graphics on the horizon. But MSI’s pivot illustrates the tough road ahead for Radeon to close the gap with Nvidia’s GeForce gaming dominance as key partners lose faith.
Whether other major board partners like Asus, Gigabyte, or AMD-exclusive brands follow MSI’s lead remains to be seen. But the situation underscores Nvidia’s firm grip on the high-end graphics market that AMD’s RDNA 3 architecture has so far failed to loosen.
