Delayed Launch and Beyond
Let’s talk about something that’s been raising eyebrows in the industry. RDNA4 cards were actually showing up in retail channels back in January – we’re talking real SKUs with actual price tags – before AMD suddenly pulled everything back to a March launch. People have even been able to buy the GPU themselves ahead of time. Now, when you see a product get delayed after it’s already hitting store shelves, that’s… well, that’s never a good sign, though may work in AMD’s favour in terms of availability, as stock has seemingly been around for a couple of months now.
When we put all this together, AMD’s path to convincing consumers becomes incredibly challenging. Let’s be brutally honest here – they’re going to need to price these cards at least 25% below NVIDIA’s MSRPs to have any chance of success. And even that might not be enough. Remember, RDNA3 launched at a 20% discount compared to NVIDIA’s offerings, as we alluded to in the beginning, and that strategy didn’t exactly set the world on fire. The market spoke pretty clearly with their wallets.
The reality is that NVIDIA’s market dominance means AMD needs to price these cards so aggressively that it might not even be financially viable. We’re talking about prices that would probably make AMD’s accountants break out in cold sweats. When you consider the manufacturing costs, R&D investment, and the need for actual profit margins, it’s hard to see how they can go low enough to really shift buyer behaviour. For instance, if the 5070 Ti is coming in at $749 as a set MSRP, then the 9070 XT needs to be around $549, and that’s just not going to happen. Instead, we’re likely going to see the 9070 XT coming in at $699 and the non-XT variant at $599 and honestly, apart from the hardcore AMD gamers out there who will buy it no matter what, I don’t think this will be enough to even put a dent in NVIDIA’s market dominance.
The technical story is mixed too. Yes, they’ve finally fixed that weird RDNA3 quirk where AV1 1080p encoding was actually outputting at 1082p, but they’ve already confirmed RDNA4 won’t support 2-pass encoding at any resolution. That’s a real step backward for content creators who need that kind of encoding flexibility. It’s these kinds of trade-offs that make it harder for AMD to justify premium pricing, even if they wanted to.
The real question isn’t whether AMD can compete with NVIDIA on a technical level – we’ve seen from the benchmarks that they can come close. The question is whether they can overcome that massive 90% market share advantage that NVIDIA has built. History shows us that in the GPU market, technical superiority alone isn’t enough – you need the ecosystem, the mindshare, and the developer support. AMD has a mountain to climb here, and they’ll need every advantage they can get. Hopefully, for everyone’s sake, they do well.
So what do you think? Does AMD have what it takes to compete with the RTX 50 series? Let me know in the comments below what you think about these leaked benchmarks and AMD’s chances in this generation.
What do I think? Well, I think that it's worth waiting a couple of days for the AMD announcement, and then a few more days for reviews. Speculation is nice and all, but we're close enough to the launch that large parts of this article will become irrelevant. Once we get answers to the questions this article raises, then it will be time for a real opinion piece about what AMD offers.
(Of course, there's the chance that you're writing this based on review samples and information that you can't publicly disclose, and just phrasing facts as questions, but even if that's the case, I certainly have no access to such data, and would therefore prefer to not make up my mind before I see the facts.)