A new rumor suggests that AMD is preparing to launch its Radeon RX 9000 series of flagship graphics cards with an “aggressive” price to compete with arch rival Nvidia.
As Wccftech reports, while AMD has yet to reveal its price plans for its upcoming RDNA 4 graphics cards, a leaker posting on IT Home suggests that Team Red won’t be messing around, and could price the Radeon RX 9000 GPUs low enough as to cause Team Green some real headaches.
The rumor also suggests this pricing could even impact sales of the older Radeon RX 7800 XT.
The cost of war
AMD launched the Radeon RX 7800 XT in 2023 for $499.99 (about £380/AU$725), so the leaker’s comments suggest that the new Radeon RX 9070 series of GPUs will launch for around $500 – $600.
This will put them in direct competition with the upcoming GeForce RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti from Nvidia, which will launch this month for $549 (£549 / AU$1,509) and $749 (£749 / AU$1,109), respectively. A new leak suggests the 5070 Ti could launch on February 20.
It’s expected that AMD’s upcoming RX 9070 XT will match the RTX 5070 Ti when it comes to performance – if that proves correct, and it costs significantly less, then Nvidia could finally have a real fight on its hands.
It’s no secret that AMD’s GPUs are a lot less popular than Nvidia’s (you only need to look at the most recent Steam Hardware Survey to see just how much Team Green dominates the graphics card market for gamers), but the company has a unique opportunity right now to take a decent chunk of the market from Nvidia.
Hype is steadily building for AMD’s upcoming GPUs, and benchmark results that are apparently early leaks are promising. If AMD nails the price, it could be in with a real shot to make Nvidia’s life a bit more difficult.
Nvidia’s launch of the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 offers another opportunity for AMD to win over customers. Not because those are bad GPUs – far from it – but because since their launch, they’ve been all-but impossible to get hold of, as stock sold out fast.
Of course, that’s great news for Nvidia, but it means AMD could tempt frustrated PC gamers to pick up one of its new GPUs rather than waiting for more stock of Nvidia’s cards to appear.
We’ll have to wait and see whether or not AMD manages to take advantage of these opportunities.
