Finally, it turns out that if you were expecting the RADEON RX 9000 series in January, you’ll have to be patient, clearly. On X, David McAfee, Vice President and General Manager of Ryzen CPUs and RADEON graphics cards, has just confirmed the launch date for the cards. We’ll have to wait until March!
The RX 9000 series for March…
The launch of the RX 9000 series was definitely a disaster, as there was a lot of hype surrounding the potential launch of the cards at CES. The media (including ourselves) even received slides suggesting this, but in fact it was nothing of the sort. As a result, the end of the company’s conference left many people perplexed, especially the company’s justifications. Since then, we’ve heard everything and nothing about these cards: first there was talk of a launch on January 22nd, then of a delayed launch… In the end, it was the second rumour that turned out to be true.
Clearly, between now and March, there’s likely to be plenty of leaks appearing on the web – and they’ve already started. We’ve seen online that retailers are starting to stock up on cards. In fact, all it takes is for an employee who is a little too curious or a little too lax to drop a card in the wild and off you go. It may sound far-fetched, but just last week we were faced with Arc B570s on the prowl before Intel’s official launch. Micro Center was fulfilling orders ahead of schedule.
Now, we can always wonder about the real reason behind such a postponement. In the end, the disagreement between AMD and resellers seems to be only part of the problem. From there, we can wonder whether the reds are simply swimming in troubled waters by not knowing what strategy to adopt in the face of its competitor NVIDIA. Is the company waiting for the launch of the RTX 5070 to position itself better? Is it a performance problem that needs solving? Is there a driver problem, or is FSR4 not yet ready? It all raises a lot of questions. Whatever the case, the brand will have completed its self-imposed deadline: the first quarter.
