AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series Launch Event: How To Watch And What To Expect
Somewhat surprisingly, AMD barely mentioned its Radeon RX 9000 series at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, while rival NVIDIA trotted out no less than four desktop GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs and also four mobile variants. Well, the wait for more official details on AMD's first consumer RDNA 4-powered graphics cards is nearly over—AMD announce it's planning a livestream launch event next week..
How To Watch The Radeon RX 9000 Series Launch Event
In a post on X/Twitter, AMD's Vice President and General Manager of Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics, David McAfee, revealed that Team Red will be hosting a livestream launch event on February 28, 2025 at 8:00am EST (11:00pm PST). So, go ahead and mark your calendars.
In the same post, McAfee revealed that the first Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards will land on store shelves soon after the launch event, in "early March." We take that to mean withing the first two weeks of March, though we'll have to wait and see.
AMD will livestream the event on its AMD Gaming YouTube channel.
Radeon RX 9070 XT And What Else To Expect
There's little doubt what is on tap from AMD. Barring a major curve ball, the company will introduce its Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 in full. It remains to be seen what surprises AMD might have in store, especially with so many leaks and rumors in the wild.
To that end, a recent leak highlighted supposed specifications for the Radeon RX 9070 XT by way of a GPU-Z screenshot. According to the screenshot, the Radeon RX 9070 XT will flex a Navi 48 GPU with 4,096 shader cores, 64 render output units (ROPs), 256 texture mapping units (TMUs), and 16GB of GDDR6 memory linked to a 256-bit bus, yielding 644.6GB/s of memory bandwidth.
The upcoming card is also shown as supporting PCI Express 5.0. Additionally, GPU-Z reported a 2,570MHz GPU clock, 3,100MHz boost clock, and 2,518MHz memory clock. It's not clear if the boost clock is a factory overclock, a user overclock, or perhaps a combination of the two.
As for the non-XT variant, it's rumored to feature 3,584 shader cores with the same VRAM and bus width configuration, and a slower boost clock.
There was also unofficial chatter of AMD releasing a version of the Radeon RX 9070 XT with 32GB of VRAM, which could have appeal to gamers who also user their GPU for AI workloads (it would basically be a pro card in gamer trim), but will it really happen? After the rumor made headlines, AMD's Consumer and Gaming Marketing boss Frank Azor (who you might also recognize as the co-founder of Alienware) said in mostly certain terms, "No, the 9070 XT card is not coming in 32GB."
We say "mostly certain" because as noted in the X/Twitter thread, he didn't shut down the notion of a 32GB Radeon card entirely, only a 32GB version of the Radeon RX 9070 XT. AMD could, for example, release a 32GB Radeon card with a different model number, or as some had initially speculated, a professional card with that amount of VRAM.
The other big question is pricing. Here again, the rumor mill seemingly got it wrong when it was reported that AMD had toyed with the idea of an $899 starting price for the Radeon RX 9070 XT. In a separate post on X/Twitter, Azor said, "While we aren't going to comment on all the price rumors, I can say that an $899 USD starting price point was never part of the plan."
Meanwhile, yet another rumor claimed we could be looking at a $599 starting price, though that might refer to the non-XT model.
Fortunately, we only have to deal with a couple more weeks of unofficial information. Stay tuned, as we'll be covering the launch event when it happens.
