AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT March launch explained by gaming GPU head

AMD’s David McAfee has responded to complaints surrounding the upcoming Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT release date. The Vice President and General Manager of Radeon and Ryzen added context surrounding the delay after the graphics cards were originally expected to arrive this month.

So far, the two AMD RX 9070 graphics cards have had a weird time since they were revealed at CES 2025. Although announced, AMD didn’t say much about the cards, their specs, or their release date. Instead, it was down to the company’s card-manufacturing partners to showcase the cards on the show floor. They look like being a cost-effective alternative to Nvidia’s RTX 5000 offerings but the full picture is still far from clear.

However, after initial speculation that the cards would appear this month or in February, this week AMD confirmed that the cards wouldn’t be launching until March. This is even though stores already appear to have stock of both cards in some cases.

McAfee, responding to YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed, said on X (formerly Twitter) that the delay is with good reason. In a post, the general manager explained that AMD is pushing the date back to give “a little extra time to optimize the software stack for maximum performance and enable more FSR 4 titles.”

We’ve had an FSR 4 hands on experience and found it to offer a big improvement over FSR 3. While it’ll only be usable on the Radeon 9000 cards, it seems AMD wants to ensure that it’s supported in as many places as possible as games ratchet up their upscaling and frame generation support.

He also added that a “wide range of partners” will be joining the launch for the cards, and want to build “initial inventory at retailers”. McAfee caps off his response by saying “You should expect many more partner cards available at launch.”

It appears that AMD is playing it cautiously when launching its next two GPUs, as well as trying to curtail any issues that could pop up. We’ve already seen the company avoid naming a price for the cards – with RX 9070 price delay rumors pointing to aggressive pricing by Nvidia being a key factor.

On top of this, AMD seems to be preparing to have stock at launch, which isn’t something that either Nvidia or Intel can say they have had handle on. While Intel’s Battlemage Arc B580 GPU is restocked semi-regularly (and scalped), Nvidia RTX 5090 and 5080 stock is said to be “very rare” at launch.

We’ve yet to see much in the way of real-world performance for the RX 9070 and 9070 XT. At CES, a Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 benchmark did show that the weaker 9070 performed admirably at 4K, extreme settings, pushing nearly 100fps. While online feathers have been ruffled by the news, our best graphics card updates will just need to wait a little longer, it seems.