AMD exec drops hints on RX 9070 pricing and some PC gamers are panicking – but this sounds like good news to me
An interview with an AMD exec tells us that a full RX 9070 launch event is coming, and that pricing will be in line with the excellent RX 7900 GRE.
AMD’s Frank Azor was interviewed by a Spanish YouTuber about RDNA 4
The exec told us that the RX 9070 will be a ‘very competitive product’
Pricing was also mentioned, in a vague way, and some gamers are taking it as a bad sign – but that’s jumping the GPU gun
AMD has given us some clues as to the price points RDNA 4 graphics cards will land at, albeit some very vague hints, courtesy of one of Team Red’s execs – and a good deal more interesting info on the next-gen GPUs besides.
All this comes from Frank Azor, AMD’s head of consumer and gaming marketing, who has been busy this week, firing some weighty flak at Intel’s Arrow Lake in the CPU world, and then sharing these fresh GPU details in another interview.
This chat was with Michael Quesada, a Spanish YouTuber who has a PC gaming channel. We should note that the conversation is in Spanish, and so the quotes we have here (courtesy of VideoCardz) are a translation (made with help from Spanish tech site El Chapuzas Informatico).
Quesada kicked off by questioning Azor on the flimsy RDNA 4 announcement at CES 2025, which provided very scant details, besides the names and existence of the RX 9070 and 9070 XT – why was this so light on information?
Azor repeated the assertion already made by AMD that there simply wasn’t time in the 45-minute CES 2025 keynote to fit in RDNA 4 and properly do it justice.
The marketing chief told us: “What are we announcing here? With the announcements of RDNA 2 and RDNA 3, we had dedicated events to present the architecture and performance improvements. We can’t cover that in five minutes. If we had, everyone would be angry with us for not giving the new graphics cards the attention they deserve.
“That’s why we decided to reserve the announcement of the new graphics cards for a separate event where we can give them proper focus.”
Azor also poured cold water on any idea that the next-gen Radeon graphics cards might be delayed (as some theorized as to why AMD kept its 9070 revelations very bare).
Everything remains on track, we’re assured, and here’s where Azor made a very interesting statement. The translation in this case is direct from YouTube (and what I could make of it), so take this with a large dollop of caution, but the AMD exec appears to admit that the other reason Team Red didn’t reveal specs and pricing for the RX 9070 is that the firm wanted to look at what Nvidia was announcing and react to that.
In other words, AMD needed to ensure that RDNA 4 is competitive with what Nvidia was doing with RTX 5000, a theory I put forward earlier this week. (Not just me of course – it’s an obvious enough thought, really, but Azor is, translation wobbles aside, saying this was indeed what AMD was up to).
The most interesting part of the interview, though, is the clues about pricing I mentioned at the outset, which cropped up later.
Azor observed: “We’re going to bring a very competitive product [with RDNA 4]. Everyone will benefit from this launch. It will be worth the wait.
“The Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7900 GRE offered aggressive pricing for their performance. The market responded well, especially in a landscape where prices are constantly rising.”
“AMD remains focused on delivering value for money. When we announce RDNA 4, we’ll introduce a powerful graphics card – not a $300 card, but also not a $1,000 card.”
(Image credit: YouTube / Michael Quesada)
Analysis: Careful with that pitchfork, Eugene
There’s some refreshing plain speaking here, then, from Azor, regarding why AMD’s reveal was tissue-thin for details on the RX 9070 models, and the lack of any pricing. It was to better pitch RDNA 4 to be competitive with what Nvidia has cooked up with the RTX 5000 series.
The part of the interview relating to RDNA 4 pricing has predictably got every forum and social media outlet buzzing. Does this mean AMD is thinking about a $650 price tag for the RX 9070 XT, some folks are asking – as that’s the average of the two mentioned low and high prices (a total $1,300, divided by two).
Of course, it’s never going to be as simple as that. But whatever the RX 9070 XT and its vanilla sibling end up costing, AMD is going to make the price to performance ratio stand up and compete with Nvidia’s RTX 5070 in the mid-range.
Simply given AMD’s chosen name change – to the RX 9070, versus the RTX 5070 – the pricing has to make sense in terms of that showdown. The MSRPs will be “very competitive” as Azor puts it, based on the relative performance provided by RDNA 4 – and as we don’t know how peppy the RX 9070 XT will be yet, trying to work out pricing averages doesn’t make any sense. Neither does running down to cellars, looking for pitchforks and torches, while muttering about a $650 Radeon flagship being a rip-off based on past performance rumors for Navi 48.
Let’s not engage with that kind of nonsense. The main point to focus on here is not the dollar amounts Azor chose to mention – and the exec used such a huge spread, of course, to make them kind of meaningless – but what he said about the RX 9070 GPUs being very competitive with Nvidia. And that these next-gen offerings will match the RX 7900 GRE for price/performance, this is the other key point to home in on. That’s an excellent value graphics card and one that remains top of our list of best GPUs, in fact, where it has sat for some time.
AMD could well be waiting to test the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti itself before finalizing pricing for RDNA 4 here. If I had to call a most likely price point, the recently aired rumor of $479, or around the $500 mark, seems more likely than anything higher than the RTX 5070’s MSRP ($549). But again, whatever it turns out to be, that price needs to be viewed through the lens of the card’s performance.
Roll on that incoming full RX 9070 launch event, then, so we can finally find out where price and performance will shake out. The rumor mill believes that an announcement is likely coming in just a couple of weeks (RDNA 4 pre-orders might kick off on January 23 based on one retailer leak). If true, that means the RX 9070 variants could be on sale at the end of January, ahead of the RTX 5070 models which aren’t out until February.
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