AMD confirms RDNA 2 gaming laptops and mainstream RX 6000 graphics cards in H1 2021

At CES today AMD has announced that it's on track to deliver RDNA 2-based notebooks in the next six months of 2021, as well as new, mainstream desktop GPUs in the same time frame. 

That's come more as an aside at Dr. Lisa Su's CES 2021 keynote, with the biggest announcements surrounding the launch of both the Ryzen 5000 CPUs in thin and light notebooks as well as the Ryzen 5000HX-series of gaming laptop processors launching in February.

So, while AMD is shifting a whole bunch of gaming laptops with its Ryzen HX chips in February the likelihood is that those notebooks will be coming with the soon-to-be-announced Nvidia RTX 30-series mobile GPUs. With AMD not getting its Radeon RX 6000 RDNA 2 GPUs into mobile form until sometime later in the year the HX chips are going to have to sit alongside green team silicon until then.

"We're On track to launch the first notebooks with RDNA 2 in the first half of the year with our partners," said Dr. Su at the event.

We were treated to a short demo of Dirt 5 running at ultra high settings, at 1440p, and nailing over 60 fps, so the mobile GPUs are clearly no slouches. 

It really is a treat that we're seeing more and more gaming laptops sporting the QHD resolution now, especially now that we're actually getting notebook graphics cards that are capable of hitting high frame rates at that res.

"And you'll also see new mainstream RDNA 2 graphics card designs in the first half of the year too," she continues.

These are expected to be two key beats for Nvidia's own CES press conference today: gaming laptop graphics and mainstream desktop GPUs, so it was vital for AMD to actually be able to announce that it wouldn't be letting the green team get things all its own way for the whole of 2021.

AMD will be playing catchup, however, as we're expecting Nvidia to be launching both first, but it's still set to be a hell of a showdown this year. All over again.