I'm as excited as the next guy for AMD's 9070-series launch but the lack of reference cards has me worried about how real its MSRP will be

How much are you willing to spend on a new graphics card? This is a pertinent question these days, and one I've been asking myself in the mirror every morning alongside 'Why don't you go to the gym more?' and 'Has that always been there?'. Anyways, we're already three cards into Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50-series and if you wanted one you'd need to spend some $1,000 or more to get one in real terms. That's a lot of cash and not anything close to what I had in mind for an answer.

The RTX 5070 Ti might have an MSRP at $749, but I paid close attention to that launch for a marginally off-the-rails live blog, in which I searched major retailers for availability and prices, and I saw little evidence of that MSRP anywhere I looked. In fact, MSI had a couple of MSRP cards listed, as did Newegg and UK retailer Scan, and none of them actually showed as 'in stock' at any time for me at that price. Now it looks like MSI has nixed the MSRP cards from its website altogether—so much for $749, then.

I asked around a few Discord channels for major graphics card manufacturers and, rumour has it, Newegg might have had some MSRP cards for sale through its Newegg Shuffle program. Though it also told us it wouldn't run one on launch day. Regardless, I feel that since I had to go out of my way to get anecdotal, 24th-hand reports that maybe a retailer had an MSRP or two available at launch, I think my point still stands whether it did or didn't: the RTX 5070 Ti's MSRP didn't mean nothin'.

We had one MSRP model for review, which our Dave liked, for good reason; and one non-MSRP model he disliked, for good reason.

A part of that, or why I think it was so noticeable this time compared to the previous RTX 50-series launches, was the lack of a first-party Founders Edition (reference) design from Nvidia for the RTX 5070 Ti.

The other pending GPU launch lacking reference designs? AMD's RX 9070-series.

A reference card helps to lay the groundwork for a GPU launch. The company with the best knowledge of a GPU, a GPU's power demands, the memory config, the power delivery requirements, etc. puts together a design of their own and partners can choose to use that as the basis for their own designs, or even use that very same design in some instances.

For Nvidia's cards, it says it offers partners the same PCB as its latest Founders Edition, and AMD has historically offered partners to sell the same reference card under their own branding.

The main benefit for consumers is generally a high quality (some exceptions, including AMD's own 7900 XTX) cooler design with stock clocks but a price tag set to the manufacturer's recommend retail price of the card.

AMD's lack of reference designs for the RX 9070-series is a little concerning for a few reasons. Firstly, I saw renders of it in the slides and it looked pretty cool, but that design is only make believe. Then, on a more serious note, if partners choose to use their allocation of GPUs to produce more high-end cards with higher price tags, leaving few leftover for the cheaper models, it raises the 'real-world' price of the 9070-series beyond its promised price tag.

For reference, the RX 9070 XT has an MSRP of $599 and the RX 9070 $549. That's what we're aiming for.

There are a few genuinely positive signs from AMD on this launch. For starters, this is a delayed launch, and that means AMD's had an extra few months to get stock into retailers. A few months might not seem like a long time to us but it could mean there's a significant increase in available stock of the 9070-series, which helps ease pressures that can lead to increased prices. Stuff like retailers ramping up prices due to high demand, manufacturers afraid to use up allocation on cheaper cards, and scalpers trying to make some moolah.

So, greater supply is good, but we knew that. The genuinely exciting news is that even AMD seems fairly confident that it will have good availability for the cards come launch day, March 6. AMD says it has "wide availability" and hasn't tried to temper expectations too much for general availability—I'd like to think the company would have learned from past mistakes and done so, if it were a real issue, as Nvidia did prior to the RTX 50-series launch, though you never know.

The other positive sign is that AMD has a good track record with offering genuinely affordable MSRP versions of its cards for the duration. Long-standing Radeon-only partners like Sapphire and XFX have generally had a good range of cards from overclocked models to more MSRP machines, and we've seen newcomers ASRock offer decent prices for the RX 7000-series. Though a few of these were originally the reference model, rebadged for each brand, those ended up making way for custom designs that still largely kept prices low.

Lastly, I think there's something to be said for AMD's pricing strategy, which appears to be keeping a product in the market for a long time even if prices gradually drop by a decent margin. We saw this with the RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT, with the latter being too close for comfort to the former at launch, but price drops actually saw a significant $100 or more reduction in the latter's price to make it much more competitive later in life.

I am still slightly concerned for the availability of MSRP models, if only with Nvidia's recent GPU launch to go off. The lack of reference model and leaving it up to third-party manufacturers ended up with fewer controls on price for the green team and led to wildly high prices at the checkout ($1,000 for an RTX 5070 Ti, really?). I'm concerned because there were, supposedly, MSRP models out there for that launch, just a few materialised on the day. So it's tough to tell ahead of time whether AMD's launch will be better. However, for the reasons I've noted, I think there's a good chance we see some competitive prices on the day. At least there's a warning there for AMD on the importance of some sort of price controls or guarantees for MSRP cards at launch.

The 9070-series launch has morphed into one of AMD's best chances in a long while to gain some gamers on side, let's hope that means something for gamers with a reasonable budget. That's the thing we often gloss over: just how pricey these cards are even at MSRP. To come back to answer my own question: how much would I realistically spend on a graphics card today?

For me, it'd be $600 max, or around £475. That doesn't leave a huge amount of leeway for the 9070 XT.