AMD has just announced that the revenue from its Gaming segment has dropped by a massive 59% compared to this period last year. The Gaming division is the part of the company responsible for gaming GPUs, not only the AMD Radeon chips used for PC graphics cards, but also the custom chips the firm makes for consoles, such as the PlayStation 5, and sales are evidently in decline.
It’s the latter that AMD has specifically pinpointed as being a driving factor in the decline of sales in its latest financial statement. Meanwhile, AMD’s Radeon GPUs still power some of the best graphics card models you can buy right now, including the Radeon RX 7800 XT, but the company has struggled to keep pace with Nvidia on ray tracing and upscaling.
These latest sales figures are revealed in AMD’s second quarter 2024 financial results, and show the Gaming segment’s revenue standing at $648 million, dropping all the way from $1,570 million in the same period in 2023, and falling by 30% sequentially compared to the previous quarter.
AMD primarily attributes the drop in sales to a “decrease in semi-custom revenue,” referring to the system-on-chip (SoC) devices AMD makes for clients such as Sony and Microsoft for their PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles respectively.
These chips not only include a Radeon GPU, but also several of the Zen CPU cores used in AMD’s processors. This drop isn’t entirely surprising, given that both these consoles have been out for nearly four years now, although the forthcoming PlayStation 5 Pro GPU is also widely rumored to be made by AMD.
The other part of the equation is, of course, the Radeon GPUs AMD makes for desktop graphics cards and laptops, and while AMD hasn’t broken down Radeon GPU sales compared to those of semi-custom SoC devices, their poor showing in the June Steam Survey suggests AMD isn’t selling a huge number of them.
There isn’t a single AMD Radeon GPU in the top 15 graphics cards in the current survey, for example, and you have to read all the way to number 57 before you find the first discrete graphics card based on the company’s latest RDNA 3 architecture, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. Comparatively, the Nvidia RTX 4060 desktop and laptop versions are both in the top 10 here.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen disappointing sales for AMD’s Gaming segment lately. The AMD Q1 2024 financial results showed a 48% decline compared to the same period in 2023 as well. In the report for those results, AMD specifically mentioned “lower AMD Radeon GPU sales,” which isn’t mentioned in the latest report, suggesting that most of the decline in revenue in this quarter is coming from custom SoC devices, rather than Radeon graphics cards.
On the plus side for AMD, the rest of the company appears to be doing well, with an overall 9% increase in revenue year on year, thanks to record figures in its data center division, as well as strong sales of Ryzen CPUs.
The next big release from the firm will be the launch of its AMD Zen 5 range of CPUs, and you can check out the leaked Ryzen 9000 prices right now, thanks to some listings that recently appeared on Best Buy.
