CES 2025 set up an old-fashioned graphics card battle between Nvidia and AMD, even if the latter showed up a little late. We know when the new RTX 50 series GPUs will debut (at the end of January) and we now know when AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT cards will hit store shelves: March.
If you want a more specific date, well, you aren’t alone. But that’s as much as AMD vice president David McAfee (whom we’ve spoken with on several occasions) is willing to share at the moment, only barely improving on the “Q1” date that was announced at CES.
A post on The Social Media Site Formerly Known as Twitter says this:
“Radeon 9000 series hardware and software are looking great and we are planning to have a wide assortment of cards available globally. Can’t wait for gamers to get their hands on the cards when they go on sale in March!”
AMD’s decision to launch the Radeon 9000 series at the xx70 level has been interpreted as an unspoken capitulation to Nvidia, who has dominated more expensive tiers of graphics cards for both industrial AI applications and consumer PCs. In the announcement (which strangely didn’t get a spot in AMD’s keynote presentation), AMD says that the new naming scheme is designed to “match direct competitor compare,” as well as align with the Ryzen 9000 CPU series.
Fighting for a more value-focused market makes a lot of sense, especially with Intel’s Arc discrete GPUs entering the market on the lower end. But that will make AMD’s pricing decisions for these cards that much more crucial, as PC gamers look for a cheaper alternative to the latest Nvidia RTX models. The RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti will cost $550 and $750 for the base models, for the sake of reference.
AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs, especially the gaming-focused X3D models, have been flying off the shelves. If AMD can deliver similar performance at a lower price, it could be a much-needed boost for the graphics card aspect of its business.
