Sean Hollister is a senior editor at The Verge and a founding member. He covers gadgets, toys, and games. He spent 15 years as an editor at CNET, Gizmodo and Engadget.
As usual, the most important Nvidia graphic card is the one that you can buy. Nvidia has talked a lot about its RTX-5070, claiming it can deliver RTX-4090 performance for only $549. AMD’s Radeon RX9070 and 9070XT will be available for a live streaming event on February 28th. Nvidia, however, has made its own wiggle-room, delaying the launch date of the RTX-5070 from February to the 5th of March, as revealed today on its product page.
Nvidia is shipping its $749 RTX-5070 Ti a week before AMD’s event on February 20th.
AMD’s telegraphed it wouldn’t be competing against Nvidia’s newest and greatest cards. Price is the only lever AMD can use to compete. The AMD Radeon cards seemed to be aiming for the performance of Nvidia’s 4070 Ti and Super cards, not necessarily higher. Nvidia could theoretically counter this if they felt it was necessary, as the company can now make $20 billion pure profit in one quarter. It also has more room now to do so.
Despite all that, there’s a rumor that AMD is working on a card with 32GB RAM, which would be more powerful than the RX 9070 or 9070 XT already announced. Frank Azor, AMD’s gaming marketing boss, confirmed that the 9070 XT will not be a 32GB model but did nothing to address the larger rumor.
