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.