AMD may cease production of the Radeon RX 9070 due to a worsening VRAM shortage.

With the Radeon RX 9070 using the same VRAM capacity as the RX 9070 XT, AMD is focusing its resources on this high-end gaming GPU.

AMD's generous use of VRAM in its current generation of Radeon RX 9000 graphics cards may be working against it, as a new report suggests the company is shifting production away from the mid-range RX 9070 to focus on the more powerful and expensive RX 9070 XT. With VRAM becoming increasingly expensive, and both cards offering 16GB of VRAM, the company appears to have concluded that focusing on a more profitable, high-end option makes more sense.

In many ways, the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 were graphics cards that should have been available from the start. When they were released, they were undoubtedly among the best graphics card options in their price range. However, AMD has consistently struggled to deliver them to consumers at the suggested retail price, and now it seems the RX 9070 may be discontinued entirely.

This information comes from the Hungarian tech website Prohardver, which claims that 'according to the information we have', AMD has not completely stopped producing the RX 9070, but 'the main focus is on the Radeon RX 9070 XT'.

The reason given is that the RX 9070 has very similar manufacturing costs to the RX 9070 XT, thanks to both using the Navi 48 GPU and having 16GB of VRAM, but their retail prices differ slightly but significantly. The suggested retail price (MSRP) of the RX 9070 XT is $599, while the RX 9070 has an MSRP of $499, so the chances of still producing the RX 9070 card profitably are very slim.

Regarding the method of shifting focus, it's currently unclear exactly how AMD is doing this. Typically, in cases like the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, the RX 9070 series GPUs are only used in those cards because they don't meet the standards for the higher-end product. This could be due to a chip defect, requiring that area of ​​the chip to be disabled, or because the entire chip doesn't achieve the clock speeds required by the higher-end configuration. If it's the latter, the manufacturer will simply disable those parts and run the chip at a lower clock speed. Either way, you can't simply turn an RX 9070 GPU into an RX 9070 XT GPU.

In any case, it seems that acquiring an RX 9070 will become even more difficult, especially at near-retail prices, in the coming months. As for the RX 9060 XT, which also uses 16GB of VRAM, it's not affected in the same way, as it uses a different GPU than the 9070 models. Therefore, there's no indication in this leak that AMD will reduce production of this graphics card.