Some thought that AMD’s upcoming best graphics cards would be launching in a matter of days, but we now know that’s not going to happen. According to David McAfee, vice president and general manager of AMD’s Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics division, the GPUs are doing great and will be widely available — but not until March.
This delay is an interesting choice, given that some retailers were ready to open preorders on January 22. Multiple listings of the card from all over the world have been leaked at this point, and although we haven’t seen almost any of its specifications, those listings implied that the cards were ready to go, or at least would soon be available.
Radeon 9000 series hardware and software are looking great and we are planning to have a wide assortment of cards available globally. Can’t wait for gamers to get their hands on the cards when they go on sale in March!
— David McAfee (@McAfeeDavid_AMD) January 20, 2025
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The manner of the announcement was pretty odd, too. After the cards were a complete no-show at CES 2025, AMD implied that the GPUs deserved their own event outside of the 45-minute keynote that also omitted its next-gen Z2 chips. Now, McAfee took to X (Twitter) to quietly reveal that AMD’s plans aren’t so set in stone, and it all comes down to an ambiguous release date sometimes in March.
At this point, with Nvidia’s full RTX 50-series range right around the corner, many AMD enthusiasts expected more. The reaction to McAfee’s announcement in Twitter replies was lukewarm at best, with many fans wondering where this delay is coming from. AMD and Nvidia are locked in a perpetual battle in the GPU market, and it’s hard not to give Nvidia the upper hand here, as we know the release date of the first two GPUs, but also the entire spec sheet for all four. Meanwhile, all we know about the RX 9000 series is that it’ll have 16GB VRAM, but even that comes from leaks.
AMD didn’t show off the cards during the event, but its partners had them on display during CES 2025, so we know the hardware seems ready to go. AMD’s Frank Azor also told the press that the cards were set to launch “in a matter of weeks,” which still checks out even if it’s at the end of March, but just barely. Nvidia’s RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti should both be out by then, with a tentative February release date.
It’s possible that one of my least favorite leaks may have turned out to be true. A Chiphell forum leaker recently shared that AMD pulled back on the late January release date for the RX 9000 series, citing “waiting for Nvidia” as one of the reasons. It’s hard to say what AMD might be waiting for at this point, but one way or another, we now know for a fact that the RX 9000 series won’t be here until March.