AMD’s generosity with the amount of VRAM it has packed into its current-generation Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards could be coming back to bite it, as a new report suggests that the company is pushing production away from its second-tier RX 9070 in favor of the more powerful and pricey RX 9070 XT. Because VRAM is getting so expensive, and both cards have 16GB of VRAM, the company appears to have concluded that it makes more sense to focus on the more lucrative flagship option.
In many ways, the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 are the graphics cards that should have been. When they were released, they were absolute shoo-ins for being the best graphics card options for their suggested prices. However, AMD has continually struggled to make them available to buyers at MSRP, and now it’s looking like the RX 9070 could effectively be put out to pasture completely.
This news comes from Hungarian tech site, Prohardver, which claims that “according to our information” AMD hasn’t completely stopped production of the RX 9070, but its “focus is largely on the Radeon RX 9070 XT.”
The reasoning given for this is that the RX 9070 has a very similar production cost to the RX 9070 XT, thanks to them both using the same Navi 48 GPU and both having 16GB of VRAM, yet they sell for a small but significant price difference. The RX 9070 XT’s MSRP is $599, while the RX 9070 has a $499 MSRP, so the opportunity to still make RX 9070 cards at a profit is vanishingly thin.
As for how it’s shifting focus, it’s unclear exactly how AMD is doing this. Generally, for a situation like with the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, GPUs for the former are only used in those cards because they’ve not made the grade for the higher-end product. That might be because there’s a defect in the chip, so that area of the chip needs to be disabled, or because the whole chip isn’t reaching the required clock speeds of the higher-end configuration. If it’s the latter, the manufacturer will simply disable the parts anyway and run the chip at lower clocks. Either way, you can’t simply magic RX 9070 GPUs back into RX 9070 XT GPUs.
Either way, it’s looking like the RX 9070 might be even more difficult to get hold of, especially at close to MSRP, in the coming months.
As for the RX 9060 XT, which also uses 16GB of VRAM, this isn’t affected in quite the same way, as it uses a different GPU than the 9070 models. As such, there’s no suggestion in this leak that AMD will be reducing production of that model.
