People thought that once the cryptocurrency mining boom was over, gamers would rejoice and cheap GPUs would rain plenty. That did happen, for a few months; and then we got the RTX 4080 at $1200 MSRP, second hand markets spiking in pricing and now what seems like AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 7900 GPU being hard to get a hold of at launch. Gamers just cant catch a break huh?
Radeon RX 7900 GPU might be one tough graphics card to get your hands on, no supply for mainland China
Multiple sources (Igor's Lab, ChipHell, ECSM_Official, BoardChannels via Videocardz) are suggesting that the Radeon RX 7900 GPU series is going to have demand far outstrip supply at launch. Before we go any further, AMD has not commented on this nor do we have any independant verification so this post is marked strictly as a rumor. If rumors are not your cup of tea - this is your chance to get off. All that said, Igor has proven to be a very reliable source when it comes to aggregation of information from industry insiders and has a very long track record of accurate leaks - which very much makes this worth covering.
According to Igor, who has aggregated the information from multiple sources, the Radeon RX 7900 GPUs are going through final BIOS upgrades which will result in delay of deliveries. According to the report, custom variants of the RX 7900 will not hit the shelves till at least January. At the same time, mainland China will not be getting any reference design cards presumably because of the existing tension between Taiwan and the US (and the sale of sensitive and advanced semiconductor technologies to China).
AMD made a fan favorite move and priced its flagship at $999 MSRP and according to some sources inside Chiphell - they are allegedly selling some cards at a loss. We have no way to confirm this so please take this claim with a grain of salt. But the fact that AMD's flagship GPU is undercutting NVIDIA's flagship means that demand is going to be through the roof. The lowered supply combined with exceptional demand potentially means that customers are going to have a very hard time finding a GPU at launch.
It gets crazier. According to Igor, the supply of the initial shipment of AMD RX 7900 GPUs to Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) is going to be around 10,000 units. To put this into context, the initial shipment of the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 was though to be around 100k and 30k respectively. 10,000 units are almost certainly going to get sold out pretty quickly and then likely get scalped for profit by "investors". Unfortunately 10,000 EMEA units still don't tell us how many units have been reserved for the NA market (it could be 20k, it could be 100k) so adding further to this would just be descending into speculation.
