Lisa Su says Radeon RX 9070-series GPU sales are 10X higher than its predecessors — for the first week of availability

Demand for AMD’s latest Radeon RX 9070-series graphics cards is so high that it is close to impossible to get a Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT add-in board (AIB) at its recommended price in the U.S., Europe, or just about anywhere else. In fact, AMD claims that its latest Radeon RX 9070 XT discrete GPU for desktop PCs is its most successful standalone AMD Radeon graphics card ever in terms of first-week sales. Lisa Su, chief executive of AMD, said in an interview that the Radeon RX 9070 XT outsold its predecessors by a factor of 10 in the first week.

"Radeon RX 9070 XT has been a fantastic success, actually, it is the number one selling [graphics card] of all of the AMD Radeon generations for first week sales by far. 10X higher than previous generations," Lisa Su said in an interview with Asus Tony. "We like to see people happy, and people are very happy with the Radeon RX 9070 XT."

First-week sales are, of course, a very interesting metric that reflects how many products were stockpiled for early birds and how many early birds were willing to buy them in the first week of sales. However, it does not reflect how many GPUs per launch quarter AMD sells, and this is perhaps a more traditional metric. That metric, in the case of AMD, did not exactly impress in recent years. Perhaps AMD has managed to sell significantly more halo products in Q1 2025 than it did with its previous generations? Let's try to analyze this. 

Pictures of AMD's Navi 48 GPUs — which power AMD's Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT AIBs — that we have seen so far indicate that the parts were assembled in late October, 2024, so the company has been stockpiling Navi 48 graphics processing units for months before formally introducing them on March 6, 2025. We have no idea how many chips and cards AMD and its partners stockpiled before March, but AMD shipped about 1.43 million discrete desktop GPUs to its partners in Q4 2024, according to Jon Peddie Research, and it is unlikely that these were outgoing RDNA 3-based processors. It is reasonable to assume that AMD had plenty of Navi 48 GPUs on hand as of Q1 2025, though the exact number is unknown.

With its family of GPUs based on the RDNA 4 microarchitecture, AMD decided not to pursue the high-end segment of the market, leaving them entirely for Nvidia with its products like the GeForce RTX 5080 ($999) and GeForce RTX 5090 ($1,999). Instead, the company focused on the performance-mainstream segment and currently offers Radeon RX 9070 at a $549 MSRP and Radeon RX 9070 XT at a $599 MSRP. At these prices, these are some of the best graphics cards on the market.

Without a doubt, AMD could easily sell more Radeon RX 9070-series graphics cards at $549–$599 (even with a 15%–20% markup in retail) in the first week than it did with the prior generation. Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX launched at $899–$999 in mid-December, 2022, and supplies weren't particularly large. When it comes to  Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT ($579–$649, launched mid-November, 2020) and Radeon RX 6900 XT ($999, early December, 2020), those products were launched amid the COVID-19 pandemic and are known for their low stock availability at launch; they sold out the first day.

As for AMD's 2019 products — the Radeon VII (Vega 20, early 2019) for $699, Radeon Vega Frontier Edition for $999–$1,499 (Vega 10, June, 2019), and Radeon RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 XT AE for $399–$499 (July, 2019) were also aimed at different market segments, but the company ramped them up (mostly the RDNA-based RX 5000-series) in a timely fashion in the subsequent quarters, so 2019 was quite a good year for AMD.

We can dig a little deeper into the past to observe the launches of AMD’s Vega (GCN 5), Polaris (GCN 4), Fiji (GCN 4), and other iterations of the GCN architecture originally introduced in 2011. But the graph based on data from JPR clearly indicates that AMD has consistently sold fewer graphics cards in their ‘halo GPU’ launch quarters (we did not include all GPUs in the graph) than in their previous cycles.

There were exceptions in 2016–2017, but mainly because AMD’s Radeon R9 Fury and Radeon 300-series GPUs failed to gain any significant popularity in 2015. The overall trend is that sales of AMD’s desktop GPUs are declining — a trend that reflects not only industry dynamics but also the company’s market share losses to Nvidia.

Could AMD reverse the trend and outsell not only the more expensive Radeon RX 6800/6900 and Radeon RX 7900-series graphics cards, but also its cheaper Radeon RX 400/500 and RX 5000-series with its Radeon RX 9070-series products in Q1 2025? To do so, AMD would need to sell over 4 million desktop discrete GPUs in the first quarter — something it has not done for years.

Has AMD managed to do beat the prior records with RDNA 4? We don't know yet. We'll need to wait and see when Jon Peddie Research releases it's Q1'25 discrete desktop GPU market share data in the coming weeks.