MSI seems to have fully pulled back from making AMD Radeon GPUs, with the company confirming with HardwareLuxx that it is solely concentrating on making custom NVIDIA GeForce RTX series GPUs.
Hardware Unboxed posted on X saying: “Did I miss this story? MSI has been completely removed from AMD’s Radeon 7000 series, all existing products have been discontinued and they never released a 7700 XT / 7800 XT. This all seems to have happened very quietly”. HBU isn’t wrong, this has happened very quietly indeed.
MSI told HardwareLuxx: “When it comes to graphics cards, our focus at the moment is actually more on RTX cards. Nevertheless, the collaboration with AMD is essential and extremely relevant for us. We see a very positive development, particularly in the area of motherboards“.
But, MSI did announce and then release its new Claw gaming handheld which featured an Intel Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” CPU, with virtually all of the leading gaming handhelds using AMD Ryzen APUs. MSI’s move into Intel’s arms with an untested CPU for MSI’s first gaming handheld was an interesting move… but the fog is lifting and it seems to be making more sense now.
Maybe Intel offered MSI a deal they couldn’t refuse — a super-cheap, heavily discounted allotment of Meteor Lake CPUs — if the company didn’t make Radeon GPUs anymore. AMD is a bigger competitor to Intel than NVIDIA is in the CPU race, as well as the gaming handheld market, with MSI’s move of using an Intel CPU inside of its Claw handheld still a weird decision to this day… it gets its ass kicked by the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme-powered ASUS ROG Ally.
And now… now we’ve got MSI quietly pulling away from AMD Radeon GPUs, and only making NVIDIA GeForce RTX series GPUs. Considering MSI has an astonishing 147 different SKUs of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs on the market, while AIB competitors GIGABYTE and ASUS have 86 and 100 cards in the RTX 40 series, respectively.
MSI has made just 4 custom RX 7000 series GPUs, while GIGABYTE has made 12 cards, and ASUS has 19 custom Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs on the market.
If we rewind back to July 2020, MSI CEO Charles Chiang died after falling off a building in Taiwan, and the company has been doing some — well, rather interesting things — in the four years since. Their custom Radeon GPUs haven’t been anywhere near as good as the custom GeForce GPUs, so this news of pulling out of Radeon GPUs isn’t a huge surprise.
The deal with Intel for Meteor Lake inside of the Claw was a big deal, and will be into the future as I’m sure the Claw 2 will be powered by a next-gen Intel Lunar Lake CPU design, while its gaming handheld competitors pump out new AMD Ryzen APU-based designs.