AMD Plans Aggressive Price Competition with Radeon RX 9000 Series

[kapone32]

The issue with those prices is that the retailer had to pay the Distributor before they could sell it. Now that basically all of these companies directly sell their products that cost could be cut out by the tune of 25-35%. With the tariffs this could also mean that GPUs will be cheaper in Canada than the US for the first time in the History of PC Gaming.

It's only a steal if you can live with the perennial problems and second class treatment by pretty much any swdev out there. Performance isn't everything, I'd say raw performance is barely half the story these days. They may not have had chart topping performance last generation, but what really hurt them wasn't that the 7900 XTX was a "discount 4080" with good raster but crap RT. What hurts AMD and will continue to hurt them for a significant while longer is that a modern GPU is only as good as the software that supports it, and this is an area where Radeon sorely lacks.

AMD needs to foster an ecosystem, provide a highly programmable runtime (just like CUDA), up their driver game tenfold if not a hundredfold by working close to swdev at both open-source and proprietary projects, placing their engineering teams at the disposal of soft houses and game studios alike, tighten their driver release schedule, improve quality assurance, etc. - these are all things that Nvidia has done, it's what enables them.

An aggressive pricing strategy might claw back 5% market share over the next quarter or two, until it inevitably begins to dwindle again as buyers start getting remorse (they aren't getting day one game ready drivers, they aren't getting any dibs on the new techs that come up, their GPU doesn't work with emulator X, app Y is horribly broken, program Z requires a compute library their card won't support, their streams look like a VHS, etc.), prices on NVIDIA RTX GPUs begin to stabilize and GeForce brings something new and innovative to the table. And the cycle repeats.

Has no one even stopped to question why we have Apple-esque MSRPs plus scalping factor and they still retain 90%+ market share?

You always come onto AMD posts with the exact same argument.

BTW AMD is already doing Open Source development. Soft houses are every single developer making Games for the Consoles that . Spiderman 2 runs smooth as butter on my PC BTW
.
Tighten their driver release? Let me see we are on 25.2.1 and it is not yet the end of February.

Who cares about the argument of Software support when the argument against AMD has been RT and DLSS

Apple is in every single school system in North America. They convinced education that they were better and became something that defined affluent.

This is not 2015 anymore. These arguments about AMD software are so foolish. Anyone who owns a current AMD card laughs at your comments .

I guess they are good for popcorn.

I expect the regular proponents of your argument to chime in too.

 

[Dr. Dro]

You always come onto AMD posts with the exact same argument.

BTW AMD is already doing Open Source development. Soft houses are every single developer making Games for the Consoles that . Spiderman 2 runs smooth as butter on my PC BTW
.
Tighten their driver release? Let me see we are on 25.2.1 and it is not yet the end of February.

Who cares about the argument of Software support when the argument against AMD has been RT and DLSS

Apple is in every single school system in North America. They convinced education that they were better and became something that defined affluent.

This is not 2015 anymore. These arguments about AMD software are so foolish. Anyone who owns a current AMD card laughs at your comments .

I guess they are good for popcorn.

I expect the regular proponents of your argument to chime in too.

Whatever you say, man. The market has spoken, it's a 90-10 split, and not my mess to clean. If you think it's foolish, then, by all means, keep thinking that. It won't change that 9 in 10 people have chosen... against your choice.

 

[kapone32]

Whatever you say, man. The market has spoken, it's a 90-10 split, and not my mess to clean. If you think it's foolish, then, by all means, keep thinking that. It won't change that 9 in 10 people have chosen... against your choice.

The market has spoken. Exactly how many 4090s were sold to China? is the 4090D included in the GPU numbers. People always like to forget the China effect.

 

[RandallFlagg]

It's only a steal if you can live with the perennial problems and second class treatment by pretty much any swdev out there. Performance isn't everything, I'd say raw performance is barely half the story these days. They may not have had chart topping performance last generation, but what really hurt them wasn't that the 7900 XTX was a "discount 4080" with good raster but crap RT. What hurts AMD and will continue to hurt them for a significant while longer is that a modern GPU is only as good as the software that supports it, and this is an area where Radeon sorely lacks.

Anyone can tell you I'm no AMD fan but, I'll say I think that is overblown. It's not without any merit at all, but it's not some existential threat.

AMD drivers are perfectly fine. Not as good as Nvidia, no, I've had to fix them a few times on mine in the past 2 1/2 years but it's trivial once you know what to look for.

And the comparisons on price are ridiculous. We aren't talking about 5% or even 10%. It's more like 25%.

Give yourself a midrange budget, say $500 that you can't exceed, and go see what your options are. Lets also say, you're running at 4K, because you need that for work and don't want to deal with the flaky behavior of switching back and forth between a game running 1440p and a desktop at 4k.

I'll tell you what you'd find a couple months ago. You'd find a generic 4070 at ~$550, and a 7800 XT at ~$450.

So you're going to pay an extra $100 (+22% more) to get these results @1440p:

The difference widens at 4K.

Now in RT, 4070 is 14% faster. But despite its growth that is still a relatively small niche. Even Nvidia users generally run in raster not RT, preferring the higher FPS.

The only real explanation is marketing and hype. I am ok with it, because that keeps AMDs prices a little lower.

Now if these cards performed the same, and there was only a 10% ($50) gap, it would be a different story and I'd go Nvidia. But that's not where we are.

 

[Rover4444]

The amount of whiners in here is insane; who really believe AMD should be selling at a loss.

$150 Less for Similar if not better performance is a steal. But I guess people nowadays don’t know a good deal if they see one.

But you’ll never please the masses

It costs the same to produce as the 7800 XT and AMD was getting 21% margins on that card. They aren't selling at a loss. They can always just increase the price later either way, a good MSRP is just a baseline and is important for initial reviews. Just look at the B580.

And by the way, "pleasing the masses" is AMD's objective this gen, they've said it themselves.

1. Are we going on by VRAM alone? The card's performance doesn't matter?

2. Yes, the lower midrange has been abandoned by both AMD and Nvidia for a while. It's bad. The only thing you can do about it is vote with your wallet and skip upgrades that aren't really upgrades.

1. The card's twice the performance but has half the VRAM it should for the price. Performance does matter, but only when it's got the hardware to support it. If the 16GB version was priced at $285 in 2023 I'd be complaining way less.

2. Yeah, that's why I'm sitting on my cards and buying Intel at the moment. Once Strix Halo comes out and actually gets support, it'll be even tougher to pick out a GPU...

It's only a steal if you can live with the perennial problems and second class treatment by pretty much any swdev out there. Performance isn't everything, I'd say raw performance is barely half the story these days. They may not have had chart topping performance last generation, but what really hurt them wasn't that the 7900 XTX was a "discount 4080" with good raster but crap RT. What hurts AMD and will continue to hurt them for a significant while longer is that a modern GPU is only as good as the software that supports it, and this is an area where Radeon sorely lacks.

AMD needs to foster an ecosystem, provide a highly programmable runtime (just like CUDA), up their driver game tenfold if not a hundredfold by working close to swdev at both open-source and proprietary projects, placing their engineering teams at the disposal of soft houses and game studios alike, tighten their driver release schedule, improve quality assurance, etc. - these are all things that Nvidia has done, it's what enables them.

Exactly! If the 9070XT came out at $500 it'd be a day-one purchase and I'd be willing to baghold until software support catches up, but a $150 discount just to not be able to use what I paid for for ten months? No thank you.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Anyone can tell you I'm no AMD fan but, I'll say I think that is overblown. It's not without any merit at all, but it's not some existential threat.

AMD drivers are perfectly fine. Not as good as Nvidia, no, I've had to fix them a few times on mine in the past 2 1/2 years but it's trivial once you know what to look for.

And the comparisons on price are ridiculous. We aren't talking about 5% or even 10%. It's more like 25%.

Give yourself a midrange budget, say $500 that you can't exceed, and go see what your options are. Lets also say, you're running at 4K, because you need that for work and don't want to deal with the flaky behavior of switching back and forth between a game running 1440p and a desktop at 4k.

I'll tell you what you'd find a couple months ago. You'd find a generic 4070 at ~$550, and a 7800 XT at ~$450.

So you're going to pay an extra $100 (+22% more) to get these results @1440p:
View attachment 384733

The difference widens at 4K.

Now in RT, 4070 is 14% faster. But despite its growth that is still a relatively small niche. Even Nvidia users generally run in raster not RT, preferring the higher FPS.

The only real explanation is marketing and hype. I am ok with it, because that keeps AMDs prices a little lower.

Now if these cards performed the same, and there was only a 10% ($50) gap, it would be a different story and I'd go Nvidia. But that's not where we are.

Yes, there's a bit more performance on tap at this segment, but like I said, performance is half the story. The raster/RT tradeoff occurs, and I'll agree having more raster than RT at this level is acceptable and generally what you'd want, but then the rest of the story kicks in. Not to mention Ada's driver support is probably only getting axed by the mid 2030's, if Maxwell is anything to go by.

 

[AusWolf]

Yes, there's a bit more performance on tap at this segment, but like I said, performance is half the story. The raster/RT tradeoff occurs, and I'll agree having more raster than RT at this level is acceptable and generally what you'd want, but then the rest of the story kicks in. Not to mention Ada's driver support is probably only getting axed by the mid 2030's, if Maxwell is anything to go by.

What rest of the story? You said it yourself, there's more performance at a $100 lower price. RT is worthless at this performance range anyway. And no one buys a midrange card for heavy work. So what's not to like?

We can nitpick every GPU in existence all day long, and the only conclusion we'll arrive at is customer bias.