Well, This Year's Graphics Card Launches Were A Right Shitshow, Eh?

This year saw the worst launch of any GPU generation I can remember in all my 20 years as a tech journo.

It's 1.55 pm, March 5, 2025. I'm pacing the confines of the home office/wooden shack at the bottom of my garden I've been inhabiting fairly solidly for the past two months as I benchmark two whole new generations of GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD, and it's five minutes before the review embargo drops for AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card. I'm on the phone with someone I've known at AMD for years. Again. And at least they're apologising for the fact the company has been unable to give me any kind of reliable pricing about the different versions of its GPU I've been testing.

There have been no reference cards for AMD's new RDNA 4 architecture, and so I've got a selection of different options—all with different price tags—in front of me to base my effectively definitive review of what is actually the best AMD GPU in many a long year. And potentially none of them are at the ultra-aggressive $599 price point that should make this impressive card an outright winner.

But, as it stands, I've spent the past 24 hours getting conflicting prices from AMD, retailers, and the graphics card manufacturers whose cards I've been testing. The XFX Mercury RX 9070 XT AMD supplied ostensibly for this review was originally touted as a reference-priced GPU, then XFX tells me it's maybe $800, no wait, actually just over $700, and that all the initial pricing chat is just launch pricing, and it'll be instantly raising prices considerably the day after.

But that also it can't tell retailers what to charge customers, so the scarcity of RDNA 4 GPUs means that final retail prices also might increase again.

It's a frustrating shitshow, which means 12 hours from the embargo lift, I had to change everything and was benchmarking the Asus Prime RX 9070 XT instead for the launch review because I'm reliably informed by Asus that it's definitely going to be a reference-priced card. Or at least is "classed as MSRP for review purposes."

And then eight minutes after the embargo lifts, XFX messages to say, "change of plan, sorry" and that now the premium XFX Mercury RX 9070 XT is going to be a reference-priced card on launch the following day. Though actually, that never comes to pass in any way that's visible online, and the card actually ends up retailing for over $900 for the next few months instead of the $599 I'm promised.

What a shit way to spend a birthday. A birthday where I'm

Source: PC Gamer