AMD exec drops hints about RX 9070 pricing and some PC gamers are panicking – but this sounds like good news to me
- AMD’s Frank Azor was interviewed by a Spanish YouTuber about RDNA 4
- The executive told us that the RX 9070 will be a “very competitive product.”
- Prices were also mentioned in a vague way, and some gamers take it as a bad sign – but that’s a GPU gun
AMD has given us some clues as to the price points at which RDNA 4 graphics cards will land, albeit some very vague hints, courtesy of one of Team Red’s executives – as well as plenty more interesting information about the next generation of GPUs.
All this comes from Frank Azor, AMD’s head of consumer and gaming marketing, who has been busy this week firing off some heavy criticism of Intel’s Arrow Lake in the CPU world, and then dishing out these new GPU details in another interview to share.
This conversation was with Michael Quesadaa 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 VideoCardz) are a translation (made with help from the Spanish technical site El Chapuzas Informatico).
Quesada started by questioning Azor about the weak RDNA 4 announcement at CES 2025, which provided very little detail beyond the names and existence of the RX 9070 and 9070 XT – why was this so little information?
Azor reiterated the claim AMD had already made that there simply wasn’t time in the 45-minute CES 2025 keynote to fit in RDNA 4 and do it proper justice.
The marketing chief told us: “What are we announcing here? With the announcements of RDNA 2 and RDNA 3, we had special events to showcase the architecture and performance improvements. We can’t solve that in five minutes. If we did, everyone would be mad at us for not giving the new graphics cards the attention they deserve.
“We have therefore decided to reserve the announcement of the new graphics cards for a separate event, where we can give them the right focus.”
Azor also threw cold water on any idea that the next generation of Radeon graphics cards might be delayed (as some theorized as to why AMD kept its 9070 reveals so bare-bones).
Everything remains on track, we are sure, and here Azor has made a very interesting statement. The translation in this case comes straight from YouTube (and what I could make of it), so take this with a great deal of caution, but the AMD executive seems to admit that the other reason why Team Red hasn’t revealed specs and prices for the RX 9070 is that the company wanted to look at what Nvidia announced and respond to it.
In other words, AMD needed to make sure RDNA 4 would be competitive with what Nvidia did with RTX 5000, a theory I put forward earlier this week. (Not just me, of course – it’s actually an obvious thought, but that’s Azor, the translation wobbles to the side, and says that this was indeed what AMD was planning).
The most interesting part of the interview, however, is the clues about the prices that I mentioned at the beginning and that emerged later.
Azor noted: “We are 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 are introducing a powerful graphics card – not a $300 card, but not a $1,000 card either.”
Analysis: Be careful with that pitchfork, Eugene
So there’s some refreshingly plain language here from Azor, on why AMD’s reveal was paper thin on details about the RX 9070 models, and the lack of any pricing. It was to better pitch RDNA 4 to be competitive with what Nvidia has come up with with the RTX 5000 series.
The part of the interview regarding the RDNA 4 awards predictably has every forum and social media channel buzzing. Does this mean AMD is thinking of a $650 price tag for the RX 9070 XT, some people are wondering – since that’s the average of the two low and high prices mentioned (a total of $1,300, divided by two).
Of course it will never be that simple. But whatever the RX 9070 XT and its vanilla brother cost, AMD is going to keep the price-performance ratio on track 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 price should make sense in terms of that showdown. MSRPs will be “very competitive,” as Azor puts it, based on RDNA 4’s relative performance – and since we don’t yet know how punchy the RX 9070 XT will be, calculating price averages isn’t enough. any feeling. That includes running to basements looking for pitchforks and torches while muttering that a $650 Radeon flagship is a rip-off based on rumors of past performance for the Navi 48.
Let’s not deal with that kind of nonsense. The main point to focus on here isn’t the dollar amounts Azor chose to mention – and of course the exec used such a huge spread to make them a bit meaningless – but what he said about the RX 9070 GPUs being very competitive with Nvidia. And that this next-generation offering will match the RX 7900 GRE in terms of price/performance, this is the other important point to address. That’s an excellent value for money graphics card and one that still sits at the top of our best GPUs list, where it has been for some time.
AMD could very well wait to test the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti themselves before finalizing RDNA 4 pricing here. Like me had to name a most likely price, the recently aired rumor of $479, or around $500, seems more likely than anything to be higher than the RTX 5070’s MSRP ($549). But again, whatever it turns out to be, that price should be viewed through the lens of the card’s performance.
Then move on to that upcoming full RX 9070 launch event so we can finally find out where price and performance will emerge. The rumor mill believes an announcement will likely come within a few weeks (pre-orders for RDNA 4 could start on January 23 based on a retail leak). If true, it means the RX 9070 variants could go on sale at the end of January, ahead of the RTX 5070 models which won’t be available until February.