AMD’s latest GPUs will be available tomorrow (December 13), and you may be able to purchase one without having to wait in line overnight. According to Kyle Bennett, founder of HardOCP, AMD has prepared 200,000 Radeon RX 7900 video cards for launch day. That would be a welcome change after years of seeing high-end GPUs sell out the moment they hit the market.
In our review testing, the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT were noticeably faster than the last-gen Radeons. When it comes to computing and synthetic benchmarks, the cards lag behind NVIDIA, but they’re within striking distance when it comes to gaming. AMD still lags behind NVIDIA’s last-generation cards in ray tracing performance.
AMD appears to be anticipating a big launch tomorrow, thanks in part to competitive pricing, with 200,000 cards on hand. A new RTX 4080 costs at least $1,200, and 4090 costs at least $1,600, but the Radeon RX 7900 family starts at $899 for the 7900 XT. The XTX costs $100 more and has a corresponding increase in compute units, clock speed, and memory.
Bennett claims that 30,000 of the 200,000 total RX 7900 cards will be Made-by-AMD (MBA) cards, with the remainder being cards from manufacturers such as Powercolor and Gigabyte. These cards typically have more aggressive styling but perform nearly identically to reference cards.
Last quarter, approximately 7 million GPUs were sold globally, a decrease from pandemic-era highs. This, however, includes cards at all price points. Premium GPUs, such as the RX 7900 and RTX 40 series, account for a smaller portion of the overall market. These figures have not been officially confirmed, and we may never know how many units will hit store shelves tomorrow, but they should be enough to keep scalpers at bay.
