Ever-increasing memory prices are prompting AMD to switch Radeon production focus to less-expensive 8GB models. However, this won’t be enough to mitigate the need for price increases, as board partners prepare to charge 5-10% more for RDNA 4 graphics cards.
Reports of these changes are emerging on Board Channels, a forum frequented by industry insiders ripe with information allegedly sourced straight from the mouths of graphics card vendors. There, posters claim AMD and board partners’ focus moving forward will be Radeon RX 9060 XT 8GB and RX 7650 GRE cards, in order to maximise production capacity.
The RX 9060 XT 16GB and RX 9070 XT apparently retain high importance, but AMD will greatly scale back production of other high-capacity cards, namely the RX 9070 and RX 9070 GRE. This development echoes prior rumours of reprioritisation, with the 9070 XT trumping its closely-related non-XT sibling.
While I’m glad that AMD isn’t completely discarding 16GB cards, I’ll wait to see how stock levels and pricing hold up. In any case, it seems like getting your hands on an 8GB GPU will be the much easier option.
Sadly, it seems we’ll be paying more for all Radeon cards, regardless of VRAM capacity. Other discussions on Board Channels claim that AMD is planning an additional 5-10% price increase for its lineup, on top of price rises that have already occurred. It seems that despite public commitments to keep graphics cards as close to MSRP as possible, market pressures are simply too great.
These higher costs won’t put AMD on the backfoot relative to Nvidia, though. Further chatter on Board Channels describes these price rises as catching up to the cost level of comparable Nvidia models. Here’s hoping we don’t see the Radeon RX 9070 XT matching the now-$1,000 price tag of the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.
Given that new graphics cards may soon become unaffordable for many, I’d love to see AMD take this opportunity to bolster its existing install base. Providing proper FSR 4 support to older generations would do wonders, and certainly generate more goodwill than a 34GB AI bundle.
There’s clearly appetite to bring FSR 4 to RDNA 3 and older families, regardless of the upscaler’s performance footprint. It’d also help plug a growing gap between its cards and those of Intel and Nvidia, with DLSS 4.5 and XeSS 2 enjoying greater backwards compatability.
It seems many gamers are content with the 8GB and 12GB VRAM capacities of the GeForce RTX 5060 and RTX 5070, according to recent Steam Hardware Survey results. However, I’d recommend aiming for 16GB models where possible to avoid the pitfalls of low video memory, even if that means putting off a graphics card upgrade.
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