We all deserve better than this

The first time I woke up last night, somewhere around three in the morning, I checked my phone to see if online stores had already posted and sold out of their stock of AMD’s new RX 9070 XT graphics cards, which carried with them the promise of a GPU launch that would finally have plenty of hardware on hand. Too early. At 5:45 am I woke up again and saw that they’d be going on sale in 15 minutes. No going back to sleep this time.

I’d already made sure I had my credit card info up-to-date at Amazon, Newegg, and Best Buy. I had Best Buy’s sole $600 MSRP card model from XFX favorited, with a notification set in the app to ping me when it went on sale. At 6:00, sitting in bed in the dark, I tapped the listing. It hung on a blinding white screen. I backed out and tapped again. This time it loaded. 6:01 am: Sold out.

I never got a notification. Was it ever even available?

Some frantic searching over the next few minutes found no listings yet on Amazon, only the most expensive add-in board cards on B&H Photo, and a range of options on Newegg. The sparkle of hope I had at seeing a $600 card available on Newegg fizzled when the website made me login again, apparently forgetting my credentials in the last six hours, and died 30 seconds later on the checkout screen. Out of stock.

So I did what so many of us do when our plans go to hell: I started negotiating with myself. I’d decided I’d only buy an RX 9070 XT at $600, its intended price, because that price was what made it such a good buy, a win over Nvidia’s impossible-to-get-anyway RTX 5070 Ti. But I was caught up in the moment. I really wanted a new graphics card.

Newegg still had stock of Asus’s $720 card. Another $120 for 60 MHz of overclocking I’d never notice? What the hell. I bought it, got the confirmation email, and went back to sleep. At least I got a card, right?

Nope. Newegg canceled my order shortly after I placed it, “voided due to insufficient stock.”

Just another GPU launch

Nothing about this experience made me uniquely cursed—if anything, it’s so normal now for anyone into the hobby of PC gaming that we seem all but resigned to it. Why get mad about a process that feels so completely futile?

AMD has told The Verge that there will be more RX 9070 graphics cards available at MSRP, stating that “it is inaccurate that $549/$599 MSRP is launch-only pricing.” That’s counter to Swedish and UK retailers, which said prices were going up after this first shipment of cards, and from an actual manufacturer who has told us that their own recommended prices are going up after the launch price is done with on the first 24 hours.

AMD didn’t offer details on how many cards were actually being sold at $600 (my guess: a pretty small portion!) and caveated its answer with “excluding region specific tariffs and/or taxes.” For everyone in the US, that means our big dumb president’s big dumb tariff on Chinese imports is almost certainly going to drive up prices.

Considering the absolute shitshow trying to buy a graphics card already was thanks to botters, assholes flipping their cards on Ebay, and comically wasteful spending on AI, we really didn’t need the assist.

All signs point to the RX 9070 launch having far more stock than any of Nvidia’s recent RTX 50-series card drops, but does it matter when there are so many people desperate to buy a graphics cards without being gouged to death? When huge swaths of manufacturing capacity are now being rerouted to produce GPUs for AI server farms, which tech companies are falling all over themselves to gobble up? So that they can illegally scrape (steal) more creative work from the internet, all in service of writing a really bland email for you or summarizing things badly?

We shouldn’t be resigned to this, because it’s frankly too embarrassing and annoying to just roll over and accept.

NFTs may have been dumb enough for us to collectively bully out of existence, but the entire tech economy is now pot-committed to AI, and even if it eventually ends up amazing and life-changing and all the things it’s been breathlessly promised to be, in the meantime it’s still getting in the way of us being able to buy some damn graphics cards for our computers.

Our hobby deserves better from the companies that made their billions on the backs of PC gaming, and it deserves better from the retailers who just shrug every time their sites crash or botters scoop up all their stock the second it goes on sale. If someone bought it, what’s it matter to them, eh? Why should Newegg honor the orders it confirmed when cards were in-stock by earmarking the next shipment for those buyers when it could cancel the orders instead and charge more for them later? (I asked; Newegg didn’t respond to a request for comment).

We also deserve better than misleading MSRPs that barely represent the reality of buying new hardware and misleading marketing pitches that overpromise what new hardware is actually capable of.

The reason to stay mad about all this is that we have proof it can be done better. Valve proved as much with its reservation system for the Steam Deck, which made it possible for everyone who wanted one of the handhelds to get one, even if it took a while.

During the height of cryptomania, beloved GPU company EVGA established a queue system to allow real human beings to reserve a graphics card with none of this “hope the website doesn’t crash under the weight of 1,000 botters hitting it in the first 30 seconds” bullshit. After tariffs led to increased prices, it even honored the original prices for people who’d already signed up to buy a card through the queue.

EVGA no longer sells graphics cards, and I’m feeling the sting of that loss more than ever now. But its absence means there’s room for any hardware company to step up and offer an alternative to the misery we’ve come to expect from trying to build a PC over the last half-decade.

If anyone’s going to do it, though, I hope they hurry up—I’d really like to buy an RX 9070 XT before AI datacenters finish cooking the planet.