Product Stack
From AMD’s slides, we can glean some information about the upcoming product stack, though many details remain redacted. The RX 9070 XT appears to be positioned as a direct competitor to the upper mid-range of NVIDIA’s lineup. Benchmark slides show it achieving 38% better performance than the 7900 GRE at 1440p and 42% better at 4K. Using these comparisons, we can estimate that the 9070 XT will be somewhat behind the 7900XTX in rasterized games, though, interestingly, potentially faster in ray-traced titles given the architectural improvements. The slides don’t provide clear information about other SKUs, but based on AMD’s usual product stack approach, we can expect SKUs down the stack to follow in the future.
Pricing
So the big one. Pricing. AMD has but also hasn’t announced official pricing. While the embargo for this content, as well as pricing was meant to go live at 2 pm UK time today, it seems China jumped the gun a little and announced pricing already at 4499 RMB for the RX 9070 and 4999 RMB for the RX 9070 XT, which by today’s exchange rates and removal of tax means that the cards come in at $549 and $599 USD respectively.
Now I’ll be honest. We had already made this content and were ready to publish at 1pm with some speculations, which went a little something like this:
While AMD hasn’t officially announced pricing yet, we can make some educated predictions based on the performance data, historical trends, and market positioning. Looking at the benchmark data and comparing to both RDNA3 and NVIDIA’s RTX 50 series, the RX 9070 XT appears to be positioned somewhere between the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti in terms of raw performance. Historically, AMD has priced their cards about 15-20% below NVIDIA’s comparable offerings to gain market share. It’s been their strategy for several generations now, and there’s little reason to think they’d change course dramatically.
So what does that mean in real numbers? With the RTX 5070 Ti sitting at $749 and the 5070 at $549, a logical price point for the 9070 XT would be around $599-649. This would position it as a better value than the 5070 Ti while commanding a premium over the 5070. It’s a sweet spot that would make a lot of sense for AMD. For the presumed non-XT 9070, a price point of $499-549 would make sense, directly competing with the RTX 5070. This would be their “bang for the buck” offering that traditionally sells in higher volumes.
However, there’s a wildcard here. Given AMD’s declining market share, which JPR data shows has dropped to just 10% of the discrete GPU market, they might need to be even more aggressive with pricing. A 25-30% discount compared to NVIDIA’s offerings could potentially help them regain some market share, which would put the 9070 XT closer to $549. That would be an incredibly aggressive move, but it might be necessary in today’s competitive landscape. Whether they would do that is, well, unlikely at best if we’re being kind given the current GPU market, but time will tell. While not explicitly stated in the slides, there have been reports of RDNA4 cards appearing in retail channels in January before being pulled back for a March launch. This suggests that manufacturing is already well underway, and AMD should have a reasonable supply available at launch.
So at least we weren’t far off what we predicted, give or take $50, but I do wonder with this pricing that was presented at a special event in China, are AMD falling into the same trap as they did with the 7700XT and 7800XT where pricing was so close that even though AMD had set MSRP’s at $449 and $499 respectively, retailers started listing the 7700 XT closer to the $420 to $430 range with some cases even going as low as $399 due to market competition, from their other cards in the stack, and from NVIDIA, and could even make the RX 9070 non-XT dead in the water from the start, while the 9070 XT could be onto a real winner here.
