Updated: DEBUNKED - Radeon RX 9070 And 9070 XT Shipments Reportedly Topped 200K In First Wave
Update 3/19/25, 8:44PM ET - AMD representatives have reached out to us here at HotHardware to note that nothing in the previously reported Benchlife article was factual with respect to quantities shipped, and at no time did AMD claim specific quantities shipped in its AI PC Innovation Summit presentation. Further, Benchlife's article has since been taken down. We have left the remainder of this article in tack, however, especially with respect to AMD Exec David McAfee's comments on our Two And A Half Geeks Livestream....
These days, you have a better shot at finding a needle in a mile-wide haystack than tracking down a current-generation graphics card that's both in-stock and priced at MSRP. It's fair to wonder how many GPUs AMD and NVIDIA actually shipped. Well, we may have an answer for the former—over 200,000 Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 graphics cards for the initial launch.
AMD reportedly revealed the 200K figure at its AI PC Innovation Summit in Beijing, where company CEO Dr. Lisa Su and other high-level executives were in attendance. So was Benchlife, which passed along the interesting nugget.
"A while ago, on March 6, the Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 based on the RDNA 4 GPU architecture were launched, and the first wave of graphics cards with a quantity of over 200K were almost sold out worldwide. Soon after, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D were launched on March 12, bringing more balanced and comprehensive performance improvements to gaming and video players," the site states (via Google Translate).
That's a lot of GPUs, and the alleged confirmation comes on the heels of AMD's Corporate VP and General Manager, David McAfee, recently telling us that demand for the company's first consumer RDNA 4 parts has been unprecedented. Here's his full(er) statement, which also addresses the restock situation...
The demand that we saw on day one was really unprecedented [...] priority number one is restocking all of our partners, [which] means all the way from retailers and e-tailers back to our add-in board partners. [...] As we look forward at our graphics business throughout the rest of this year we want to make sure that users are able to buy cards at the prices that they expect to see in market. We're doing everything we can to make that happen [...] I think as we refill the channel from what happened last week you'll see more supply coming across not just the opening price points but across the entire range as we look at the rest of this quarter (Q2) and beyond.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA recently claimed that it shipped twice as many GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards as it did GeForce RTX 40 series models in the first five weeks after launch. None of this absolves either company for not doing more to keep partner pricing in check, but it does underscore the rabid demand for the latest-generation GPUs.
In AMD's case, it's been a couple of weeks since its newest Radeon parts released to retail, which adds context to the reported 200,000 figure. What it basically boils down to is that both AMD and NVIDIA (and it's hardware partners) are selling the latest generation graphics cards as quickly as they can stock them. Hopefully we'll see supply catch up to demand in the coming months, including more options at baseline MSRPs.
