The critical and commercial success of Radeon RX 9070 Series graphics cards are doing wonders to improve the perception and prevalence of AMD’s GPU business. The brand doesn’t plan to stop there, though, as it will expand its RDNA 4 offerings via budget-oriented RX 9060 Series models later this year. This leaves a high-end gap in its stack and while it doesn’t seem likely that the company will plug it anytime soon, it’s at least keen on returning to the space down the road.
AMD CVP And GM, David McAfee, recently spoke with HotHardware and gave their perspective on the likelihood of high-end Radeon graphics cards making a return. The core of their answer was short and sweet, but hopefully suggests the company will make a spiritual successor to the likes of RX 7900 XTX.
“Certainly we have aspirations to cover the entire gamut of gaming solutions that are out there in the market,” McAfee says. “Maybe one day we’ll get there, but for now we’re really focussed on growing scale, driving the developer relationships that come from having a bigger footprint in the graphics market, and that’s the near-term focus of our graphics business.”
Summarily, don’t expect Radeon RX 9080 or 9090 SKUs to materialise in the near-future, if at all. It’s a shame, as I and many others would love to see AMD deliver alternatives to the likes of GeForce RTX 5080 and 5090, particularly in light of stock shortages. However, its product stack makes sense given its goal of increased market share.
Looking at the Steam Hardware Survey, at the time of writing more than 50% of the platform’s users rock 50, 60, and 70 class GeForce graphics cards. It’s evident that gamers crave affordable options, with the likes of RTX 4090 and RTX 3090 accounting for less than 2% of those surveyed by contrast. Of course, price is only part of the equation as brand and vq1alue perception are key to driving sales, both variables that AMD has struggled to communicate effectively leading to the almost non-existent presence of its Radeon RX 7000 Series cards.
AMD appears to have addressed both of these problems with its Radeon RX 9070 Series, as stock for its cards continues to fly off store shelves despite problems maintaining MSRP. The quality of its FSR 4 upscaling no doubt plays its part in this regard too. The question now becomes whether the company can maintain this momentum with its lower-end offerings and with future GPU generations, in spite of its competitors’ efforts.
I’ll be keeping a close eye to see how much of a splash Radeon RX 9070 Series has made in the next Steam Hardware Survey. I’m keen to see how well AMD performs relative to Nvidia and for the moment expect some unprecedented results. Make sure you’re following Club386 on Google News in the meantime for more coverage like this as well as other musings on all things tech.
