Friday, January 17th 2025
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PowerColor Radeon RX 9070 Reaper Graphics Card Stock Appears in UK
PowerColor started its online marketing campaign for new Reaper graphics card family earlier this week—a rendered scythe graphic was posted on social media along with this cryptic message: "The Reaper has arrived. Everything is under your control. Will you be the Reaper or the one reaped?" The Taiwanese graphics cards company has already unveiled its opening salvo of new RDNA 4-based card designs—on the internet and in real life. For example, PowerColor's Radeon RX 9070 XT Reaper model was on display at CES 2025—where TechPowerUp spent a couple of minutes with an SFF-form-factor-friendly demonstration sample. Since then, more photo evidence has been posted on the AMD subreddit—a UK retailer appears to have units in-stock at their warehouse.
Team Red is seemingly operating in silent mode—they have not revealed concrete details about the upcoming launch of Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 (non-XT) GPUs. Preliminary specification leaks and photos of boxed retail units have turned up this week—with yesterday's Reddit post indicating that Scan UK has received a big cardboard box containing PowerColor Radeon RX 9070 Reaper cards. Industry watchdogs reckon that AMD is still forming a release strategy—with board partners and retail/e-tail outlets waiting on and seemingly ready to receive new or finalized instructions.
Sources:
AMD Subreddit, PowerColor Facebook post, VideoCardz
Team Red is seemingly operating in silent mode—they have not revealed concrete details about the upcoming launch of Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 (non-XT) GPUs. Preliminary specification leaks and photos of boxed retail units have turned up this week—with yesterday's Reddit post indicating that Scan UK has received a big cardboard box containing PowerColor Radeon RX 9070 Reaper cards. Industry watchdogs reckon that AMD is still forming a release strategy—with board partners and retail/e-tail outlets waiting on and seemingly ready to receive new or finalized instructions.
64 Comments on PowerColor Radeon RX 9070 Reaper Graphics Card Stock Appears in UK
It's not launched yet, this is just a leak posted by a Scan UK employee uploading a photo from their warehouse. The carton has the distributor, sender, recipient info and we even know it was flown by Emirates Skycargo From Hong Kong to Manchester.
Proof that the final retail product is sitting on retailer shelves in the UK ready to be shipped to customers as soon as AMD fires the starting gun. I think the true Nvidia fanboys will start considering AMD only when the price/performance is so good that Nvidia's FOMO-tier features can't compensate enough.
To me, those die-hard fans will likely change their mind only when both of the following are true:
- A $500 AMD card has significantly faster raytracing than a $500 Nvidia card, even though they never bother to enable RT anyway.
and- A $500 AMD card running at native/100% resolution can beat a $500 Nvidia card using DLSS to boost the framerate.
That's the point when an Nvidia fan runs out of excuses like "but DLSS is better" and "but the RT performance of AMD sucks" and stuff like that.Perhaps diehard was the wrong phrase, because that's a miniscule, yet vocal and argumentative minority who aren't relevant to the wider picture. There's clearly a majority of the gaming population who continue to buy Nvidia cards even when there are plenty of examples in the last two generations where an AMD card at the same price as an Nvidia card outperforms it natively, without even needing to use DLSS - vloggers like HUB, DF, Daniel Owen often make this point painfully clear - yet people have bought into the Nvidia feature set marketing, like DLSS and RT are hard requirements, despite the overwhelming number of Nvidia buyers ending up with lower-tier cards like the 3060 Ti and 4060 that actually lack both the VRAM and computation speed to enable RT, whilst also requiring DLSS enabled at 1080p resolution, which looks like total garbage compared to native 1080p.
You could even argue that the 4070 falls into that category since people who initially bought one for $600+ were likely trying to run at 1440p high-refresh, and RT + DLSS quality in many of the RT-enabled 2023 titles on a 4070 would have been a blurry 50-75fps experience bumping into VRAM limitations now and again as well. The 4070 was the 'least bad' 40-series launch card from a pricing/value perspective, and it's still aged like milk over the last 18+ months.
The colour of envy
Products aren't AMD's problem. AMD's problem is the lack of "influencers" pissing their pants in joy when the CEO comes on stage and shows an annotation-free green bar that vaguely relates to some fake frames.
The 6600 XT is an outlier, because of covid, scalpers and economic recession.
Look at RX 5600 XT price: 279$, RX 7600 price: 279$.
If these things are 4070 Ti Super competitors, I doubt you'd be drooling at that price ;)
I'm not expecting AMD to have a GPU to rival the performance of 5090, or even the 5080 ...
BUT ...
If they can rival the performance of GPU right below those, @ MASSIVELY INFERIOR prices, they can STILL put up a fight against nVidia and gain NOTICEABLE market share, depending on availability of their products.
Both AMD/nVidia had nice and lousy moments of offerings.
I hope that isn't the case but AMD is awefully quiet if they indeed have a killer product.
It would certainly be interesting to peak behind AMDs curtain right now. Whether people would agree with the whys of the situation is surely a matter of debate.
So...
The point I was trying to make is that dropping prices in order to match the competitions entry level products doesn't make you competitive. If it did, then everything can be competitive, I can make a GPU myself and sell it for 1$. Does that mean im competing with nvidia now cause they don't offer GPUs for 1$?
CP2077 Path tracing is about the same framerate on both, but to use it at playable framerates (50+) you need to turn on aggressive performance upscaling AND framegen, so it looks like total ass and the input lag is really really bad. Not unplayable, but definitely offputting enough that I don't think even 30fps console peasants would be okay with it.
This is one of those cases where you just don't use path tracing because it's well out of the reach of either GPU.