Yeston, one of AMD’s partners for Radeon 9000 series GPUs, has indicted that RX 9070 supply should start to stabilise through April. The brand informs its customers that it ships as many units as possible every week, but current supplies are insufficient to meet demand. With just a little patience, though, the brand says it expects to get orders back on track by May.
It seems that nobody is safe from GPU shortages. Starting with Intel and its Battlemage cards, followed by Nvidia’s RTX 50 Series, and now AMD’s Radeon RX 9000, none managed to satisfy demand regardless of pricing. An especially grave situation for AMD, which banks on market share, a thing that can’t be done if only a small portion of users manage to purchase its cards.
The Japanese market is a prime example of this situation were many have opted for Radeon cards, which pushed AMD’s market share to 45%. While GeForce’s limited availability may have played a role in this, AMD should double down and release even more GPUs somehow before the winds change. More supply should also improve prices, which would subsequently drive adoption rates up. Maybe enough to convince some Nvidia users.
For those who didn’t follow the news, AMD Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT saw price hikes similar to Nvidia’ GeForce RTX 50 Series, including models that began at MSRP. Even so, many buyers bit the bullet and got one anyway, perhaps to avoid further increases or because they had enough of waiting. Either way, this meant that store availability was non-existent in some places, and inconsistently priced in others, with the drip-feed supply asking for as much as 10% or 20% above MSRP.
This wouldn’t be an issue if store shelves were adequately filled. There is no issue with non-MSRP models as long as basic options are readily available at the official price. We hope GPU manufacturers find a solution quickly as many users are starting to grow impatient. The focus on high-margin datacentre chips is partly to blame for this, but that’s a story for another day.
