AMD Promises RX 9070 XT In Early March, and Rumors Point to the 6th

AMD CEO Lisa Su confirmed that its next-generation RX 9000 series graphics cards will launch in “early March,” beginning with the RX 9070 and 9070 XT. She wouldn’t be drawn on specifics, but there is a rumored March 6 launch date, which would certainly qualify, as well as an alleged late-February debut for the new hardware.
This is all very speculative, but in the absence of AMD being forthcoming about its next-generation cards, there’s not much else to go on. Although Team Red was initially expected to launch new RDNA4 graphics cards at CES 2025, it ultimately opted to just show off a couple of slides—despite there being many examples of the 9070 and 9070 XT on the show floor from AMD partner companies. It then pushed the launch off to sometime in March, though now it’s been narrowed down a little more.
We may never know exactly why there was such a juggling of AMD’s launch schedules, but rumors and conspiracies point to AMD’s drivers not being ready in time. It’s also been suggested that it’s a reaction to Nvidia’s hyperbolic performance claims for the RTX 5070 as matching 4090 performance (“with AI,” in small print). Perhaps launching a 70-series card that falls short of those claims wouldn’t have looked good in the near term. Releasing in March, after the 5070 presumably fails to meet those expectations, might turn out better.
For now, it’s a waiting game, but perhaps not one that we’ll be playing for too long. Following rumors that AMD would hold an RDNA4 press briefing before the end of February, chief architect of gaming solutions at AMD, Frank Azor, said that we can expect “full details” for the new cards “soon.”
In a follow-up post from a user hoping that AMD prices its new cards between $75 and $100 lower than the RTX 5070 (suggested retail price: $550), Azor also said that AMD was listening. That’s no guarantee, but it does suggest that AMD is aware of the potential to steal some thunder from Nvidia by undercutting its underwhelming new GPUs.
Rumored specifications (via VideoCardz) for the RX 9070 and 9070 XT suggest they’ll use the Navi 48 die, and have 16GB of memory each – with only boost clock speeds separating the two cards. We’ve seen some alleged performance leaks of RX 9000 GPUs that suggest they won’t be able to compete with the new RTX 5070 and 5070 XT, and others that suggest they’ll outperform them.
Ultimately, we’ll have to wait and see just how competitive these new cards are with each other, but it sounds like that might not be too far off.
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