AMD finally gives the Radeon RX 9070 XT a release date and it’s (roughly) March

Not a moment too soon, AMD has finally put a release date on the much anticipated Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT GPUs. They go on sale in March. Yeah, just March, no specific day in March has yet been indentified by AMD.

Still, cue much rejoicing from gamers after a high-value graphics card, right? We’ll certainly be celebrating if the boards are as cheap and performant as the rumours suggest.

The news comes from the X account of AMD’s consumer CPU and GPU boss, David McAfee, who said, “Radeon 9000 series hardware and software are looking great.”

As we reported last week, these news RDNA 4-based GPUs didn’t seem imminent following the launch that wasn’t a launch at CES. What’s more AMD’s promise at the show that we’d see the 9070 and 9070 XT some time in Q1 allows for a launch right up to the end of March. So, it all makes sense.

Of course, it does all still beg the question of why not sooner? After all, AMD’s previous generation of GPUs, the Radeon RX 7000 cards, were out right at the end of 2022. The company has already missed its usual two-year cadence for new GPU families.

There’s no official answer to that question. But a number of factors are likely at play. First, there’s a good chance that the GPUs that are about to launch weren’t AMD’s original plan for this generation.

AMD went for a chiplet design for RDNA 3 and the Radeon RX 7000 family and the expectation for RDNA 4 was a refinement of that approach. As we no know, AMD didn’t go with chiplets for RDNA 4 and if that wasn’t what was initially intended, then no doubt that put the whole proces behind schedule.

Then there was Nvidia’s price bomb dropped at CES. Aside from the $2,000 RTX 5090, Nvidia’s new graphics cards were cheaper than many observers expected. OK, at $549, the RTX 5070 still isn’t exactly cheap for a mere ’70 series model. But it may have been positioned lower than AMD was expecting.

If so, AMD may have needed some time to adjust. Which AMD’s Frank Azor admitted to in our backstage chat at CES about the cards’ non-appearance at the show. Perhaps that meant just reconsidering the positioning of the 9070 and 9070 XT. But it may also involve complications like rebates for board makers or other channel partners who signed up based on a different, higher pricing structure.

Or maybe March was the plan all along, though we do rather doubt that. AMD very much gave the impression at CES that it had pulled a full RDNA 4 reveal at the last moment.

Still, none of this will matter if the new cards are as good as the rumours. Ah, yes, those rumours. Allegedly, the 9070 XT’s performance is about on par with an Nvidia RTX 4080, maybe a little faster for raster, maybe a little slower for ray tracing, but in that ball park.

Now, when you consider that the performance uplift of the new RTX 5080 looks modest, perhaps 15% or so going on Nvidia’s own data and excluding 4x Frame Gen (and you really should exclude 4x Frame Gen from these kinds of broad performance comparisons), then it’s apparent that AMD’s new cards could be quite competitive.

If they also come in at the rumoured price levels, some of which have the 9070 XT at $480, then factor in AMD’s much-improved ML-based FSR 4 upscaling, well, you have quite the proposition.

All of which will make the wait for March quite a long haul. There’s quite a lot riding on this and expectations are now so high the risk of disappointment is obvious enough. But here’s hoping RDNA 4 is every bit as good and every bit as cheap as all those rumours.