Earlier this week David McAfee, AMD's corporate vice president and general manager of client channel business, announced that the company would release its next-generation Radeon RX 9070-series graphics cards this March. Late on Wednesday, he clarified that the company wants its partners to deliver as many custom boards to retailers as possible to ensure widespread availability on release day. In the meantime, AMD will polish its drivers to ensure the new products are among the best graphics cards straight out of the gate.
"We are focused on ensuring we deliver a great set of products with Radeon 9000 series," McAfee wrote in another X post. "We are taking a little extra time to optimize the software stack for maximum performance and enable more FSR 4 titles. We also have many partners launching Radeon 9000 series cards, and while some have started building initial inventory at retailers, you should expect many more partner cards available at launch."
So far, AMD has disclosed that its Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards are based on the RDNA 4 architecture and are positioned for performance-mainstream market segments, something that is indirectly confirmed by a rather moderate die size of the Navi 48 graphics processing unit. The company has not disclosed the actual specifications of these add-in-boards — even though there are rumored specs — so it is hard to make educated guesses about the performance of these products.
As it turns out, AMD intends to spend the next 1.5 – 2 months finessing drivers for its RDNA 4 architecture and probably ensuring that FSR 4 technology works with a higher number of games. This will promote out-of-box performance of the new graphics cards and will likely demonstrate a decent uptick compared to predecessors with FSR 4 enabled. It is expected that FSR 4 will support frame generation technology and this capability significantly improves performance on paper.
AMD's partners will also have a couple of extra months to learn how to better enhance performance of AMD's Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics processors, so perhaps some AIB models will feature significant performance enhancements achieved by factory overclocking the GPU.
Finally, with positive reviews and plenty of factory-overclocked models, AMD hopes to grab a larger chunk of the market from its rival Nvidia, which initially focuses on the highest end of the market with its GeForce RTX 50-series products. Of course, it remains to be seen whether AMD indeed manages to occupy a significant part of the market without a real halo product.
