AMD has apparently priced its elusive new Radeon RX 9070 gaming GPU range too high to compete with the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000 series, which is reportedly the reason why there’s no word on the specs, price, or release date yet. The new AMD Radeon RX 9070 graphics cards were announced at CES with curiously little fanfare, despite plenty of graphics cards from various manufacturers being on display. The reason, according to this rumor, is that the company is now stuck in a pricing quagmire as retailers already have stock of the cards.
While Nvidia is expected to take the award for the absolute best graphics card when the RTX 5090 release date arrives shortly, we were hoping that AMD would at least be able to answer the RTX 5070 with a competitively-priced alternative. However, given Nvidia’s current dominance in the market, AMD is going to have to price the new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT very competitively.
As always with rumor and speculation, bear in mind that none of this has come directly from AMD, so take it with a grain of salt. This particular rumor comes from a moderator on the PC Games Hardware forums called Pokerclock, who shared some findings in a post on the forum.
“Apparently,” says Pokerclock, “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. The problem is that price corrections for deliveries that have already been made can sometimes be difficult.”
We can confirm that the cards definitely already exist, as we saw loads of them at CES, and shared several Radeon RX 9070 photos from the tradeshow, from the likes of Asus, Sapphire, PowerColor, Gigabyte, and XFX, as well as AMD reference cards.
One way AMD could fix the apparently high pricing is to offer cashback or marketing deals in return, enabling retailers to still offer the cards at new prices set by AMD. However, Pokerclock also claims that “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.”
Nvidia recently announced the RTX 5070 price at CES, and it matches the current RTX 4070 price while undercutting its original $599 launch price by $50. CES also saw Nvidia announce DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Gen, with CEO and founder Jensen Huang claiming it made the RTX 5070 as fast as the RTX 4090. That’s a bit of a stretch, as it requires your game to support Multi Frame Gen, but we found the new budget card actually beat the current flagship in Marvel Rivals in our recent RTX 5070 vs 4090 test.
According to the latest leaks, the Radeon RX 9070 XT performs similarly to the RTX 4070 Ti, and we were also really impressed by AMD’s new AI upscaling tech in our FSR 4 test in Ratchet & Clank. However, AMD will really need to improve its ray tracing performance and make sure FSR 4 is implemented in as many games as possible if it really wants to compete with the new RTX 5070, and it will also need to price its new GPUs seriously competitively. If they’re priced too high they’ll be dead in the water.
Hopefully, we’ll find out more details about AMD’s new GPUs soon, but in the meantime, check out our guide to the new Nvidia RTX 5000 series to see what’s coming soon from its nearest competitor.