AMD’s RX 7900 GPUs are now available, but you can’t buy them. That’s right, the company has decided that it doesn’t want to sell them directly to consumers. Instead, it will be selling them through its partner companies. This decision is likely a result of the RX 7900’s high price point and lack of performance. AMD is hoping that by selling its GPUs through partner companies, it can make more money and keep the prices down for consumers.
Both the Radeon RX 7900 XT and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX are now available for purchase… sorta. The 7900 XT starts at $900, while the 7900 XTX starts at $1,000. Both cards are competitors to the NVIDIA RTX 4080 and the RTX 4090 respectively, and while testing shows NVIDIA’s alternatives still have a slight edge in a number of games and scenarios, AMD’s cards are clearly the more sensible options. After all, the RTX 4080 starts at $1,200, and the RTX 4090 costs a whopping $1,600.
It looks like the cheaper price point is resulting in higher interest for the cards, too. The cards went on sale and almost instantly sold out — whoops. The cards are also currently being sold by scalpers for 50% and even 100% markups.
We should note here that GPU stock is far from normal right now, as NVIDIA is also struggling to keep its cards in stock even as GPU cryptocurrency mining is largely extinct now. We’ll have to see how they fare as far as stock goes over the next weeks. As of now, reseller markups on NVIDIA cards aren’t that brutal (roughly 30% at most), perhaps signaling that resellers are having a hard time getting rid of them and that retailer stock is about to normalize.
AMD’s new cards are close to NVIDIA’s options and they cost much less, so they’ll definitely have a higher demand, at least initially. NVIDIA is also considering price reductions for its just-launched GPUs as well.
If you want a sensible, yet powerful GPU, AMD’s RDNA 3 cards sound like a solid option. Just hope for stock to come back at some point.
Source: ExtremeTech
