RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT launch supply reportedly paltry due to software issues and shipment delays

The release of next-gen Nvidia GPUs hasn’t exactly been what many were hoping for. For instance, the US$1,600 RTX 4090 FE is hard to find at MSRP and the expensive RTX 4080 represents a poor price/performance ratio because of which it doesn’t look like a meaningful upgrade over its predecessor. The stage looks set for AMD to claw back some market share from Team Green.

The upcoming RX 7900 XT and the RX 7900 XTX from AMD are significantly cheaper than Team Green’s offerings. Team Red has claimed that the RX 7900 XTX is a direct competitor to the RTX 4080 with performance that is up to 1.7 times more vs the RX 6950 XT at 4K. So, the RDNA 3 GPUs could be a viable alternative to Nvidia RTX 40 cards provided you can find them at MSRP.

Sadly, consumers could find it exceedingly hard to obtain the RX 7900 XT and the RX 7900 XTX at all let alone at MSRP if the newest report from igor’sLab is true.  

Per igor’sLab’s sources, a combined total of 10,000 RX 7900 XT/XTX reference cards will make their way to the EMEA market. Out of these 10,000, 3,000 boards are reserved solely for German stores leaving the rest of EMEA with a fairly limited supply of 7000 GPUs. AMD is expected to first release the reference designs of the RDNA 3 boards before AIB cards make their way to the market.

Now, the question is: Why such low inventory on a launch that could prove to be a game changer for the company owing to them undercutting the competition?

Igor’sLab claims that the constrained supply could be because of software issues like BIOS and driver problems. There are alleged memory leaks in drivers causing potentially bad performance and even GPU freezes. If true, these issues could explain the initially poor Geekbench run of the RX 7900 XTX.

There are also supposed delivery delays. Per igor’sLab, one “big exclusive partner” could only start delivering boards very close to release and it could take a week from launch for actual availability. Another AMD partner expresses similar concerns suggesting that its products won’t be purchasable until January. VideoCardz suggests that, aside from the aforementioned software issues, the delays in shipments may also be due to COVID-induced problems like factory closures.

Finally, it looks like there won’t be any RX 7900 XT/XTX reference models for mainland China. The AIB models will reportedly replace reference models in the country when the cards launch on December 14. The cause for this surprising development appears to be Taiwan-China tensions.

As always, these reports are unconfirmed and could be entirely off. So, it would be better to exercise some caution here.

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