Nvidia’s Geforce RTX 4090 is the sole leader among gaming graphics cards, both in terms of performance and the current price of around 1,800 dollars. But why isn’t AMD fighting back?
This is exactly the question high-ranking AMD employees asked in a recent interview ITMedia answered how Wccftech reported. Accordingly, there were several reasons against making a similarly fast RX 7000 graphics card – which would be possible in principle, according to AMD.
By the way, if you want to take a look at a completely different graphics card in advance, against which the price of the RTX 4090 almost seems cheap, we recommend the following article:
The first reason: too high a price
According to AMD’s David Wang, the cost of a GPU like the RTX 4090 is too high for end customers and hasn’t been something AMD would think about for years:
We don’t have a 1800 euro GPU like the competition [Nvidia] planned for PC gaming fans in recent years. Instead, we’re focusing on GPUs that fit into the $1,000 bracket and offer a good balance of performance and cost.
According to Bergman, the almost 700 dollars that you currently save when buying an RX 7900 XTX compared to an RTX 4090 can be saved more sensibly and invested in other PC parts such as the CPU. One can’t help but think of the recently released Ryzen 9 7950X3D with 3D V-Cache:
Intel will probably have to nibble on that for a long time: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D in the test
However, there should definitely also be enthusiasts who don’t shy away from the costs of either the graphics card or the CPU. Instead of saving money on the RTX 4090, you can finally buy it and still pack an expensive CPU like the Ryzen 9 7950X3D if you can (and want) afford it.
The second reason: the power consumption
In an interview with ITMedia, Rick Bergman from AMD also states that AMD wants to concentrate on the price range up to a maximum of around 1,000 dollars with the RX 7000 generation. At the same time, Bergman admits that the targeted price can change for each GPU generation.
However, the entire infrastructure, including the required power supply unit and the appropriate PC housing, is important to AMD, which is strongly influenced by the power consumption of the graphics card. This ultimately led to the fact that no graphics card was built at the performance level of the RTX 4090:
Even high-performance hardware should be able to be operated with a reasonable power supply unit […] and can be installed without an extremely large case. The high-end cards of the current RX-7000 generation were developed with these requirements in mind.
It should be borne in mind that the RX 7900 XTX is already worse off than the RTX 4090 in terms of energy efficiency. It is therefore obvious that a significantly faster AMD model at the performance level of an RTX 4090 would have had problems with the claims formulated by Bergman to suffice, especially in a direct duel with the 4090.
Ultimately, from our point of view, it is also very unlikely that AMD will ever dare to approach the performance segment of the RTX 4090 again in the current RX 7000 generation with a new graphics card based on the RDNA3 architecture.
What do you think of AMD’s statements about the decision against a possible Radeon competitor for the RTX 4090? Basically just marketing statements or is there more substance behind it? Would you also like an opponent from AMD for the RTX 4090 or is this price range uninteresting for you anyway? Feel free to write it in the comments!
