The Radeon RX 9070 Series, the first GPUs from AMD to leverage its new RDNA 4 architecture, haven’t been released yet because they are too expensive relative to the competition, according to new speculation brewed by a forum post from a PCGH insider who claims that the Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT have been delayed for reasons that include “unclear marketing funds” and trouble between AMD and its retail partners.
“Apparently, there is no agreement (both AMD and retailers in particular) on the price at which these graphics cards should be sold, because the originally planned price range appears to have been set far too high in view of the looming competition from Nvidia,” reads one of the latest forum posts from Pokerclock, which was posted yesterday. “The problem is that price corrections for deliveries that have already been made can sometimes be difficult.”
“In practice, this is often cushioned with marketing money or cashback payments,” it continues. “The manufacturers pay the dealers a kind of bonus for each graphics card sold or offer higher discounts the more units are sold. Once these payments are fixed, the dealers take this into account in advance in the form of lower prices.”
“This works well as long as the payments flow. But this is exactly where there seem to be real problems,” Pokerclock continues. “On the one hand, AMD seems to have to pay a significant cashback, significantly higher than it actually wants and appears to be economically healthy. On the other hand, there are reports in dealer circles that AMD is already several months behind on cashback payments and that this is already leading to liquidity problems in some places. Or to put it another way: The dealers don’t want any more until AMD clarifies certain things and presumably it won’t work without marketing money from day 1 of the sale. At least not if you want to be attractively positioned compared to the competition in terms of price.”
“The reason for the ongoing chaos could be that AMD has set the launch price of the RX 9070 (XT) significantly too high. In order to keep the new graphics cards attractive, they would have to be reduced in price before the release,” reads a summary of the potential issue posted by PCGH. “At the same time, however, the first delivery has already been paid for by the retailers. This could be solved, for example, by a cashback campaign from AMD, in which the retailers get some money for each model sold. But there are further problems here. Apparently the company has been late with previous payments of this kind for months, so that the retailers do not want to pay in advance with a price reduction.”
These claims of the Radeon RX 9070 Series being too expensive come a few weeks after NVIDIA confirmed that the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and GeForce RTX 5070, two of its new “Blackwell” GPUs for gamers and creators, would be launching at $749 and $549, respectively.
Discussion (15 replies)
Join Discussion →Ffs March ???
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We can look at the 6000 and 7000 series launches as to why. AMD always has production problems. When the 6000 launched I'd swear there was only like 200 cards world wide for sale. They were so slow to get stock out for 6-8 months. Then same thing happened with 7000 series, couldn't get one for like 4-6 months after launch.
Hopefully they're pushing the launch to produce enough silicon to meet demand.
March is smart, pair it with 9950X3D/9900X3D, and, then, they get the spotlight after NVIDIA launches everything, so they get the 'last' word so to speak, it'll be more recent in peoples brains after the excitement of 50 series plays itself out for the first couple of months. Launching it now, it would get drowned out.
Not like Nvidia and intel are doing much better with availability of GPU's
Well March and proper pricing surely is the right move. Passing them out early to reviewers might be a good thing too idk.
I think AMD could actually do pretty well price/performance wise.
On rasterizing the 9070 should beat the 5070, so does the 9070TX vs the 5070 Ti.
At first it seemed like AMD didn't have a chance, but now that the dust has settled it fares so much better. I think even AMD had doubts and pushed back the launch. Maybe they are also working on a multiframe solution.
BTW there are rumors that DLSS framegen could be coming to even the RTX30 series and multiframe to the RTX40, would that mean that the RTX4090 would be as fast as the RTX5090?
Since Frame Gen does not give you more performance in games, no.
I can't wait until we have a new metric called "perceived performance"
Or a "Rendered vs Generated Frame Ratio"
Not sure what marketing would spin it as, but for the rest of us, it would be real frames vs fake frames.
Well, the RTX 5090 is claimed to be twice as fast as the RTX4090 using multiframegen, since multiframegen can potentially double the frames, then the 4090 would be up to twice as fast, ergo, matching the RTX5090.
Too much to unpack there at the moment, but no.
End-user experience is everything. If the perception is improved, then it's improved.
Note that it's not just the upper bound of performance, but what's possible at the lower tiers too.
Just like all the new cars that pump in V8 engine noise.
If the car sounds better, it must go faster, right?
Nope, gotta paint flames on the sides for that to happen.