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We’ve now seen the launch of the hotly anticipated new lineup of graphics cards from AMD with both the new 9070 series hitting shelves. So far, the brand new AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 cards have made an impressive show, and both are even coming in at an enticing MSRP, mostly. All this had us posed to expect a brutal launch for those trying to get their mitts on a new GPU, and boy, we weren’t wrong, as most MSRP listings sold out within 10 minutes.
With the reference price for these new cards sitting at the $599 price mark for the RX 9070 XT and $549 for the RX 9070, combined with known stock shortages, we were expecting this whirlwind launch. Both sets of cards were tricky to get your hands on, especially at the recommended retail price, though thankfully it wasn’t quite as bad as the recent RTX 5070 launch from Nvidia…
During PC Gamer’s live blog coverage, our reporter Jacob Fox, was met with sites being inundated with traffic. Those who’d already registered their interests with websites, or were willing to pay inflated prices had the best chance at nabbing a new AMD card. While we did see some MSRP listed cards around, they tended to sell out within 10 minutes.
JFox summed up the event as such: “MSRP ones did at least appear briefly, but were pretty consistently sold out after just 10 mins—but they were actually there, unlike RTX 5070 ones which seemed to barely appear, if at all. Higher priced cards stuck around for half an hour or so.
“Newegg’s ones went up late, like half an hour later, which spread it out a bit. Some RX 9070 non-XTs at higher-than-MSRP stuck around for quite a long time, til an hour later at Newegg.”
In all, Jacob reckons it took just under two hours for stock to go completely—except for a few in the UK, where actual stock levels seemed markedly better than in the US.
Hopefully stock improves with time, and prices stay fair. We’ve been delighted by the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT with its new RDNA4 take on graphics, improved ray tracing, and better yet, its relatively humble suggested price tag. It seems a solid choice for gamers looking to upgrade, but it’s all fairly moot if gamers can’t get their hands on one.
And especially so if those MSRP numbers do end up just being treated as just launch day prices by graphics card manufacturers, no matter how much AMD might wish to encourage them otherwise. We know at least one manufacturer who plans to now bump their MSRP cards up by almost $100, and retailers in the UK and the Nordics have also noted that there were quotas on how many could actually be sold at the base price no matter what the stock levels were.
If the actual AMD-quoted prices are as ephemeral as they seem in the cold light of this post-launch day, it could end up taking a lot of the shine off the RX 9070-series launch. Though it’s worth saying that those prices will still be relative to the equally high, beyond-MSRP being charged for Nvidia’s RTX 50-series.
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Kurt Indovina
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