The tech community has been filled with shakeup after shakeup recently, and AMD has been one of the core parties of that. Today, they came back to give a bit more of a rattling to their competitors, namely Nvidia.
Team Green released their 30-series graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090, not too long ago. In a matter of hours – 6:00 AM PDT, October 29th – they’ll drop the lowest of that line, the highly-anticipated 3070.
But today, AMD had different plans for the PC enthusiasts looking to upgrade or build a new gaming rig. AMD took to the stage today to announce the upcoming release of their competing card, the Radeon RX 6000 series.
We discussed this card a bit earlier today, which you can read about here. For now, we want to focus on one facet of the release – how badly should one expect this announcement to hurt the sales of the soon-to-be-released RTX 3070?
The answer, simply, is that it’s hard to tell for a single reason – when it comes to selling a high volume of cards, Nvidia is already its own worst enemy.
Anyone who wanted to get their hands on the RTX 3080 was almost undoubtedly out of luck, with the cards selling out in under two seconds. This was primarily due to Nvidia doing nothing to stop bots from grabbing them all.
This left an extremely sour taste in the mouth of plenty of consumers, which was only made a bit worse by Nvidia pushing back this current launch, which was supposed to come out two weeks ago. Many fans were already looking for other avenues.
Then there’s also the direct competition in terms of value and performance – while the cards that AMD announced are somewhat pricier, they’re also (according to AMD, who obviously have a bit of a bias) better than the 30-series Nvidia has presented.
We’ll need to wait for benchmarking to properly see whether these claims are true, but with the way that Nvidia has handled it all, the answer may just come down to how the launch of the 3070 goes tomorrow morning.
The delay was intended to make it so that Team Green had enough time to produce enough 3070s to meet demand, as well as shuffling sale of these cards off to others – Best Buy and Microcenter for the United States, for example, will be fielding most of the sales.
It’s likely that this will be the make-or-break for many enthusiasts. With so many production issues, it may simply come down to what card gamers are able to actually get their hands on first.
