Micro Center stores had hundreds of AMD cards at launch, supposedly reported by employees that I've heard about. I had someone tell me that their local Micro Center store actually had signs up listing a total of 610 AMD cards available launch day. There are a total of 28 MC locations in the States. If each store had had at least 400 cards or up to 600 cards, that means just between MC stores that's a total of 11,200 to 16,800 cards.
We can tell from Mindweaver's
GPU stock postings that AMD cards have been selling and some restock has been happening, but that's just a small timeframe capture and we don't know for sure how many cards have come and gone since the initial launch day at MC. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say just from MC locations alone they've sold around 20K AMD GPUs. The interesting thing about MC is that you can't just go in and buy up a bunch of GPUs at once, you're limited 1 every 30 days per household (at least at my MC). This means these cards are getting distributed amongst a lot of individuals and not just to bots snagging up what they can to scalp.
What you need to remember about the 40x0 series vs the 50x0 series is that their was a longer period between card releases:
* 4090 launched first on October 12, 2022
* 4080 launched a month later on November 16, 2022
* 4070Ti launched about 6 weeks later on January 5, 2023
* 4070 launched 3 months later on April 13, 2023
Here you have 4 cards launching over the period of about 6 months.
The 50x0 series launch timeframe:
* 5090 launched January 30, 2025
* 5080 launched January 30, 2025
* 5070Ti launched a month later on February 20, 2025
* 5070 launched a couple weeks later on March 5, 2025
Here you have 4 cards launching over the period of about 1.5 months.
It's easy for Nvidia to say, "But look! We have more cards shipped on this series compared to last!" because they had these all shipped out in about a quarter of the time it took them to get the same number of cards out with the 40x0 series. This is just another marketing ploy, if you ask me. Nvidia trying to save face that they screwed up, dropped the ball and are scrambling to catch up....so what do they do, what any good PR would do to help misdirect the customers while trying to save face: Point out that they had more GPUs this time around when compared to last gen to help paint a rosy picture about the current situation.
Here's what I noticed about the launch of 40x0 cards: The 4090 was near impossible to get until almost 6 months after it launched. The 4080s sat on the shelves (at least my local Micro Center store) for weeks before they even started to sell and once they did sell they were very slow to be replaced. I didn't really care much about the 4070/Ti models to pay attention to how they sold.