- AMD’s Frank Azor was interviewed by a Spanish YouTuber about RDNA 4
- The executive told us that the RX 9070 will be a ‘very competitive product’
- Price was also mentioned, vaguely, and some gamers take that as a bad sign, but that’s jumping the GPU gun.
AMD has given us some clues about the prices the RDNA 4 graphics cards will arrive at, albeit some very vague clues, courtesy of one of the Red Team executives, and also a lot more interesting information about the next generation GPUs.
This all comes from Frank Azor, AMD’s head of gaming and consumer marketing, who has been busy this week, taking some major jabs at Intel’s Arrow Lake in the CPU world and then sharing these new GPU details in another. interview.
This talk was with Michael Quesada, a Spanish YouTuber who has a PC gaming channel. We must keep in mind that the conversation is in Spanish, so the quotes we have here (courtesy of VideoCardz) are a translation (made with the help of the Spanish technology site El Chapuzas Informatico).
Quesada began by questioning Azor about the flimsy RDNA 4 announcement at CES 2025, which provided very few details other than the names and existence of the RX 9070 and 9070 XT: why was there so much information?
Azor repeated the claim already made by AMD that there simply wasn’t time in the 45-minute CES 2025 keynote to include RDNA 4 and do it proper justice.
The head of marketing told us: “What are we advertising here? With the announcements of RDNA 2 and RDNA 3, we had dedicated events to present the architecture and performance improvements. We can’t cover that in five minutes. If we had, everyone would be mad at us for not giving the new graphics cards the attention they deserve.
“That’s why we decided to reserve the announcement of the new graphics cards for a separate event where we can give them proper attention.”
Azor also poured cold water on any idea that the next-gen Radeon graphics cards could be delayed (as some theorized about why AMD kept its 9070 revelations very close to the vest).
Everything is on the right track, they assure us, and this is where Azor made a very interesting statement. The translation in this case is straight from YouTube (and what I was able to do with it), so take it with a grain of salt, but the AMD exec seems to admit that the other reason the Red Team didn’t reveal specs and pricing of the RX 9070 is that the firm wanted to pay attention to what Nvidia announced and react to it.
In other words, AMD needed to make sure RDNA 4 was competitive with what Nvidia was doing with the RTX 5000, a theory I presented earlier this week. (Not just me, of course; it’s a pretty obvious thought, actually, but Azor is, the translation teeters to the side, saying this was actually what AMD was doing.)
The most interesting part of the interview, however, is the pricing clues I mentioned at the beginning, which emerged later.
Azor observed: “We are going to bring a very competitive product [with RDNA 4]. Everyone will benefit from this release. It will be worth the wait.
“The Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7900 GRE offered aggressive pricing for their performance. “The market responded well, especially in a scenario where prices are constantly rising.”
“AMD remains focused on delivering value for money. When we announce RDNA 4, we will introduce a powerful graphics card, not a $300 card, but not a $1000 card either.”
Analysis: Watch out for that gallows, Eugene
So there’s a refreshingly straightforward speech here, from Azor, about why AMD’s reveal was very thin on details about the RX 9070 models and the lack of pricing. It was to better introduce RDNA 4 to be competitive with what Nvidia has prepared with the RTX 5000 series.
As expected, the part of the interview related to the price of RDNA 4 has made all the forums and social media vibrate. Does this mean AMD is considering a $650 price for the RX 9070 XT? Some people wonder, since that is the average of the two low and high prices mentioned (a total of $1,300, divided by two).
Of course, it will never be as simple as that. But whatever the RX 9070
Simply given the name change chosen by AMD (to RX 9070, instead of RTX 5070), the price has to make sense in terms of that matchup. MSRPs will be “very competitive,” as Azor says, based on the relative performance provided by RDNA 4, and since we don’t yet know how dynamic the RX 9070 XT will be, trying to calculate average prices doesn’t help. any sense. Nor does it make you run into basements, looking for pitchforks and torches, while muttering that a $650 Radeon flagship is a rip-off based on previous rumors about Navi 48 performance.
Let’s not get involved in that kind of nonsense. The main point we need to focus on here is not the dollar amounts that Azor decided to mention (and the executive used such a large difference, of course, that they were meaningless), but what he said about the RX 9070 GPUs They are very competitive with Nvidia. . And that these next-generation offerings will match the RX 7900 GRE on price/performance, this is the other key point to focus on. It’s a great value graphics card, and in fact, it’s still at the top of our best GPUs list, where it has been for some time.
AMD could well be waiting to test the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti before finalizing RDNA 4 pricing here. yes me had To call the price more likely, the recently issued rumor of $479, or around the $500 mark, seems more likely than anything higher than the RTX 5070’s MSRP ($549). But again, whatever it is, that price needs to be viewed through the lens of the card’s performance.
So, move on to the upcoming RX 9070 full launch event so we can finally find out where the price and performance will move. Rumors believe an announcement is likely in just a couple of weeks (RDNA 4 pre-orders could begin on January 23 according to a leak from a retailer). If true, that means the RX 9070 variants could go on sale at the end of January, ahead of the RTX 5070 models that won’t come out until February.
