There have been a number of inflection points in the PC component space over the past couple of decades. Nvidia taking a dominant position in the GPU market in the late 2000s, AMD’s Ryzen processors hailing a return to true competition in the CPU space, or Apple upending the laptop dynamic with its M chips. And now it feels like we might be on the cusp of another, with the impending launch of AMD’s RX 9000 series graphics cards.
Not because they’re going to blow the doors off on performance, or introduce new features that we haven’t seen before. Indeed, if they can just match Nvidia’s RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti with their own frame generation tech, I think we’d all be happy enough.
It all comes down to pricing and availability.
The emperor isn’t wearing any clothes
Nvidia is the undisputed ruler of the consumer graphics card space. And a major portion of the professional GPU space. And one of the largest manufacturers of AI hardware in the world. It’s one of the world’s richest companies for a reason. But when it comes to graphics cards for gamers, its taken its foot off the gas. A lot.
The last three generations of graphics card have been impressive, taking generous leaps in rasterization performance, improving raytracing and upscaling gen over gen. But this has come at massively increasing power requirements, and with the RTX 5080 and 5090, there wasn’t even that much of a return for it. Beyond melting power connectors, that is.
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There’s also an ever greater reliance on upscaling to deliver the kind of performance jumps people expect. But that’s just lead to Nvidia leaning more heavily into hyperbole in its marketing, further skewing expectations. Stock shortages have driven up prices on the latest new Nvidia GPUs to truly ridiculous heights, further highlighting Nvidia’s lack of interest in putting gamers first.
There’s an argument to be made from a corporate financial perspective, that gaming just isn’t a major earner for Nvidia compared to its other ventures — it accounted for less than 10% of its revenue in Q3 2024. But that doesn’t make the situation any better for gaming fans who want big generational improvements: Nvidia just isn’t delivering them.
If AMD can’t do that either, it could at least make what is available more affordable.
AMD’s shot
AMD has a real chance with its RX 9000 series to truly offer something value oriented. It categorically ruled out competing at the top end for this generation of graphics cards, which isn’t the end of the world when very few people buy XX90-series class GPUs anyway, even if it is a shame — the hype around the 6000-series “Big Navi” reveal was very exciting.
So it’s focusing on the mid-range. The cards that most gamers actually buy. And we’re getting a look at them in just a few days, with them hitting store shelves a week or so later. Expectations of performance have been revised down in recent weeks, prompting many to just hope they can keep up with the new RX 50 series and won’t be too outplayed by their own last-generation flagship cards.
But as with almost everything in the PC component space, it all comes down to price. Nvidia’s cards aren’t just expensive at their suggested price, they’re practically non-existent. The 5070 Ti and 5070 are likely to go the same way, even if stock numbers are higher. Nvidia GPUs are popular among gamers, and that means they’re even more popular among scalpers.
AMD’s cards won’t be immune to that, but it can thwart it. If prices are low and stock is high enough, AMD can give gamers an affordable, sensible upgrade with most of the features offered by the Nvidia competition. Even if the 9070 and 9070 XT don’t blow the doors off in performance, that would be enough.
The delay better be worth it
AMD ceded a lot of ground to Nvidia with this generation of graphics cards by not going hard with its CES debut. Nvidia garnered incredible press and gamer attention with its over the top claims about what the 50-series can do, and its multiple frame generation technology is super impressive in the right scenario. DLSS 4’s new transformer upscaling is excellent, and the day one support for it was just as impressive. If you can actually get your hands on an RTX 5080 or 5090, you’re going to have a great time — even if you probably paid a lot for the privilege.
But AMD may have given itself the chance it needs by taking that time. That extra couple of months may have allowed it to stockpile cards so that when they do go on sale, people who want one can actually get them. Just having enough at a fair price will even get around most of the problems of scalpers, too. If you know an RX 9070 is going to be available at $450 or there abouts, why would you buy from a scalper?
Red tinted glasses
This is probably all wishful thinking. AMD has had moments like this in the past with its graphics cards. We all hoped that the 6000 series would finally offer a credible performance alternative to Nvidia, and it didn’t quite manage it. We hoped that the RX 7000-series would be more efficient and more affordable than Nvidia, by enough to matter. It only sort of did.
It’s also clear that AMD is taking the opportunity with its CPU dominance against Intel to cement higher prices, rather than continue to be the plucky underdog on pricing and performance simultaneously. AMD doesn’t exactly make a tonne of money off of its gaming divisions these days either.
But I hold out hope. As Nvidia becomes ever-more an AI and datacenter-first company, gamers need someone making hardware for it that makes them a priority. Someone that considers what most gamers want and need: affordable, sensible upgrade opportunities so they can continue to enjoy the best PC gaming has to offer.
If AMD misses its shot here and just gives us another $500+ graphics card that sells out super fast, that’d be a real shame — and some of us expect that’ll come to pass. In that case, I might start to pin my hopes on Intel expanding its future offerings to give us more 1440p-tier graphics card options.
But there’s still a chance AMD pulls this off. Here’s hoping.
