Monday, January 20th 2025
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AMD's Radeon RX 9070 Launch Faces Pricing Hurdles
AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards have hit an unexpected roadblock, according to recent reports from PC Games Hardware. Despite physical units already reaching select retailers, the launch appears to be delayed due to ongoing pricing negotiations. Industry insider and forum moderator "pokerclock," known for accurate predictions about NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 50 series, reveals that AMD's initial pricing strategy has created tension with retail partners. While boxes bearing the RX 9070 branding have been spotted in retail channels, disagreements over costs have prevented an official release. The core issue stems from AMD's aggressive pricing approach for both the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT models. Retailers have pushed back against what they consider excessive wholesale costs, forcing AMD to reconsider its strategy.
The company now faces the complex task of potentially reducing prices while compensating retailers who have already purchased inventory at higher rates. Sources suggest AMD may offer marketing funds or cashback incentives to bridge the price gap, though negotiations have reportedly stalled. For example, we recently reported on the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT AIB model costing around $549. However, NVIDIA has announced its GeForce RTX 5070 at the same $549 price point, with potentially equal or higher raster, ray tracing, and AI capabilities across the board. For AMD to make the value case, the company would need to undercut NVIDIA's pricing. Until that is resolved, retailers aren't allowed to place RDNA 4 GPUs in general sale yet.
Sources:
PC Games Hardware, PCGH Forum, via VideoCardz
The company now faces the complex task of potentially reducing prices while compensating retailers who have already purchased inventory at higher rates. Sources suggest AMD may offer marketing funds or cashback incentives to bridge the price gap, though negotiations have reportedly stalled. For example, we recently reported on the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT AIB model costing around $549. However, NVIDIA has announced its GeForce RTX 5070 at the same $549 price point, with potentially equal or higher raster, ray tracing, and AI capabilities across the board. For AMD to make the value case, the company would need to undercut NVIDIA's pricing. Until that is resolved, retailers aren't allowed to place RDNA 4 GPUs in general sale yet.
175 Comments on AMD's Radeon RX 9070 Launch Faces Pricing Hurdles
Nvidia also does the same thing there is a reason the 5090 only has 32GB of VRAM and not 48GB's like a A6000 model.
For the 3d modeling and CUDA you mention above both AMD and NV want you buying their workstation videocards for that use case.
AMD (just like many from the industry) must have been surprised with RTX 5000 pricing, probably they thought $50 more or whatever for RTX 5070/5070Ti MSRP based on the info that they had from the industry so the RX 9070 series original pricing plan was accordingly higher.
And instead of AMD dropping immediately the RX 9070 series pricing accordingly based on the competition’s announced MSRPs and cover their partner’s channel they just delay the launch 2 months in order to see the exact performance of RTX 5070Ti/5070 and if Nvidia MSRPs are going to stick (probably hoping for lower performance for RTX 5000 series or for inflation or both lol) just to save a few bucks per card.
Just looking at the below slide (if we take it at face value), if the correlation is based on price, AMD's original pricing plan for RX 9070 was lower than RX 7900GRE and higher than RX 7800XT so let's say between $529-$479 (lower than RX 7900GRE MSRP and higher than RX 7800XT street price).
If the correlation in the slide is based on performance the conclusion is the same (then RX 9070 would had lower performance than RX 7900GRE but higher than RX 7800XT, so the MSRP should have been max $529 just to match the previous gen performance/price ratio…)
The difference between RX 9070 and RX 9070XT is small for reference type models (even if RX 9070 is 10% lower clocked than RX 9070XT and also has 10% lower memory clock (18Gbps instead of 20Gbps for example) based on the leaked specs (4096 vs 3584 SPs) the difference wouldn't be higher than 17% at 4K and even lower in QHD (RX 9070XT=100 / RX9070=83) so the logical conclusion for the original RX 9070XT plan was to be max +$100 vs RX 9070 so let's say between $629-$579 (or even less ($50-$70) if RX 9070 isn't so lower clocked and especially if we take on account the differences for older generations - RX5700XT/RX5700 $50 difference, RX6800XT/RX6800 $70 difference, RX7800XT/RX7700XT $50 difference etc)
Something is really wrong with Radeon group and Nvidia gets again a free pass to price and sell their cards as they like.
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/nvidia-geforce-rtx-5090-and-rtx-5080-likely-to-be-extremely-hard-to-get-at-launch.331335/
Intel did it very right... releasing a single low tier GPU thats nowhere to be found, that requires a high-end CPU to play nice. Cudos!
Looking at it positively, given how AMD has literally renamed their GPUs to crib their competitor's naming standard, it makes sense to go all-in on this copycat/confusion strategy and launch their similarly-named GPU at the same time NVIDIA launches the 5070, for maximum effect at spoiling the latter's launch; NVIDIA won't be able to prevent this by launching early. Having two months' of stock ready and waiting to ship also means that AMD will be able to overwhelm 5070 stock levels and essentially nullify that launch with hordes of (hopefully cheaper) 9070s. Intel's new GPUs aren't competing in this segment so can't spoil anything (B770 is nowhere to be seen and scuttlebutt suggests it may have already been cancelled).
On the negative side, the hype for 9070 is right now. In two months' time, that hype bubble will have been significantly deflated by the raw performance of 5090 and 5080 (or rather, these cards will have shifted the market's expectation of performance) and the NVIDIA 5000-series hype train will be going full steam ahead. There is always the possibility that NVIDIA decides to lop another $50 off the 5070's price to rain on AMD's parade, given that the former's traditional avenue of combatting competition by launching early isn't an option here. And of course the big one... for the first time in a long time AMD has the opportunity to launch a mid-range product before their competitor, and "first to market wins" is as true as it's always been; a two-month head start is nothing to sneeze at.
I honestly don't know. I can understand the reasoning behind this move, but I can't see a marketing strategy that is entirely predicated on what your competitor decides to do, being sustainable in the long term - because all it takes is one change in behaviour from said competitor, to throw your strategy for an unrecoverable loop. NVIDIA only really got to their current position of market dominance when they stopped reacting to what AMD was doing, and started doing what they believed would make them successful... I honestly can't remember the last time that AMD's GPU division was setting the pace in the graphics industry, as opposed to following the trail that NVIDIA has previously blazed.
Let's just hold thumbs that the stars align for AMD this time around, because if they don't...
Oh 3GHz boost? Cool.
16GB memory? Infinitely wise choice.
AI performer? Great.
Using cheaper GDDR6 memory that keeps the price in check? Awesome.
We really aren't asking for much here. Minimal marketing materials and a solid launch date. Go!
If this card drops anywhere near $600 USD it won't compete anywhere. Everyone (other than AMD) knows this.
I've waited since last January to get things rolling with a working 7900XT and failed. Waited for 9K series and now AMD is using shops for cheap storage rental. Wat?
This nonstop nutfuckery will have me considering team green and I know better. I already know the encoder solves one problem and every other detail creates 5 new ones.
Their cards won't play ball with the rest of my gear and I need the bandwidth. I need Radeon's raster and I'm not going to get it from Jensen's el cheapo AI units at any price.
AMD needs to give us the launch or cancel for UDNA since the bridge from here to there is going to sour a lot of people buying this generation of card.
After this I won't be making the jump to it anyway. This breaks any confidence I had in their ability to run a statement of work.
Sell off the Radeon branch to literally anyone that cares about making GPUs because whatever you want to call this strategy, ain't it. Except we already know how this will go. AMD will sit on the advantage until it spoils.
A two month lead becomes a zero month lead becomes a four month lag behind nVidia.
Why then model inflation at all? I'm putting that question in your mouth, because it's a reasonable ask. Development costs, low initial yields, and all of that fun is amortized. It's built into the cost of the silicon overall, because any good foundry is constantly improving. The old silicon is getting cheaper, but price stays stagnant because the new silicon's development is built into the cost....because foundries do like to stay in business. As such, you model your costs on a regular cadence of cheap oldest processes, improving older processes, and high cost new processes. This is the same thing all manufacturing does...because if they didn't they wouldn't make a profit.
Regarding the announced delay...this sounds like a bad time for AMD. Even the most optimistic interpretation of this is that a two month delay with cards in the wild points to shenanigans behind the scenes. There's no greater failure than having inventory sit unable to be sold at retailers...because that crap is going to get out. This points to deeper issues than a pricing concern...
When you want to get market share you rush to be first in the market. Intel did that and it's new cards where tested against 2 years old RX 7600 and RTX 4060, that's why they got so favorable reviews. AMD waiting for 5070 and for the new techs Nvidia is promoting with 5000 series to get traction in the market, to start getting implemented in games, this is at least stupid if not on purpose. In NO way it will help AMD to get market share.
Just remembered reading a few days ago some analysts who downgraded AMD to expect AMD to do even worst in gaming this year and now I think I understand what that analyst knew then, that we learned just now.
Although, you started your comment with some positives, for which, you could equally be branded an AMD shill. Maybe you're a shill of both companies, who knows. :roll:
All joking aside, I feel the same as you (exhausted), albeit, on the other side of the spectrum. It definitely has become excruciatingly difficult lately to have a decent conversation about processors and graphics cards, their makers and their features without being labelled a fan of the other side whose opinion should under no circumstances be taken seriously by anyone. If you mention your dislike towards a single thing that Nvidia does or says (regardless of your reasons), boom, you're an AMD fan and your opinion is invalid. I'm not saying that it's any better from the other side. I'm just sad that we as a society have sunk so deep where our love for tech is divided into "camps", where everybody sees the world through red or green glasses. It makes me wonder what I'm really doing here wasting my time replying to individuals who will never care for my reasoning, just use the opportunity to throw some more excrement my way because I've hurt their precious feelings towards their precious brand. Herd mentality never ceases to amaze me.
I've also come to the point when I've deleted my system specs from my profile, and filled it with some random crap, because it immediately made me look like a shill, and every single one of my points in every thread invalid, even though I own lots of stuff from all three major chip makers, so I know what I'm talking about. Most people here give advice based on reviews they've read - I give advice based on stuff that I actually own or have owned at some point. I used to be proud of my new purchases, but now I feel more like hiding, because whichever brand you buy, it basically makes you a shill.
Anyway, hang in there and keep up the good stuff. 'Twas a nice chat. :)
Right now, after CES, what's left in people's mind is that a 549$ card matched the 1600$ flagship....
And the marketing really sucks, for example one of the strong features of AMD is that as you start lowering quality settings, AMD is gaining performance vs the competition (usually all the sites are testing at max or mix/ulta-high, but you can see it for example in some tests like igp vs entry discreet, just check for example w1zzard's 8500G review , GTX 1060 is around +30% normally in ultra 1080p vs RX6400, but at 1080p lowest settings in this games selection RX6400 is +5% vs GTX 1060.
They really don't know what are their strong points and how to market them (in the above example, surely for many folks that don't buy $600 plus and keep their VGAs 4-5 years this is a strong incentive for buying AMD and i doubt many are aware of this) I suspect that this is causing a big problem for some retailers/etailers that they don't have good cashflow situation.
AMD should do something to help them, it's not cheap storage it's free storage lol
Now I could be forced to suck it up (pay more) and get Nvidia.
The most profitable desktop generation remains the gtx 1000 series sold at insane profit margins. The 1080 was a 60 class GPU sold at 600-700$ when it should have been 350$ or so. Well that's how Nvidia dominated 2007-2015 when they should have been beaten during this period.