The new Steam Hardware Survey is out, and we're now starting to see some of the latest generation of GPUs creeping up the chart. Several of the latest Nvidia GeForce graphics cards are now appearing, including the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti, as well as the more expensive RTX 5080. There are two new GPUs that are conspicuous by their absence, though, and those are the new AMD Radeon RX 9070 cards.
Despite photos of huge stacks of graphics cards apparently being in stock and then immediately selling out, our current pick as the AMD GPUs to appear, at numbers 13 and 14, are integrated chips found in its Us.
What's going on? There are several factors at play here, and one of them is undoubtedly real-world pricing. While supply of all new GPUs in the US is sadly still a lottery, you can readily buy most new GPUs in Europe now, and now that pricing has settled down a bit there, a stark dividing line has risen between the GeForce RTX 5070 and the Radeon RX 9070 cards.
The Radeon RX 9070 is supposed to have the same price as the GeForce RTX 5070 at MSRP, but in actuality the latter now goes for £499 in the UK ($553 ing for taxes and exchange rate differences), while the cheapest Radeon RX 9070 card you can find in stock now costs £599 (around $664), a massive £100 (around $131) difference. Meanwhile, a Radeon RX 9070 XT is supposed to cost just $50 more than the RTX 5070, but stock is scarce, and the cheapest card in stock costs £668.99 ($742).
If these are the actual real-world prices, then the MSRPs AMD is quoting for its new GPUs are largely irrelevant. The Radeon RX 9070 is the better GPU at MSRP, but the RTX 5070 is now a better buy when it comes to real-world pricing.
Another factor is simply brand recognition. While AMD's 3D rendering performance has been competitive, the ray tracing performance of its GPUs has been comparatively poor until now, and the company has also had to play a huge game of catch-up with Nvidia when it comes to new features such as upscaling and frame generation.
The Nvidia GeForce brand has been on top for so long now that it's become synonymous with graphics cards in the minds of gamers. I had a lot of criticisms in my RTX 5070 review, from this GPU's meager 12GB of VRAM to its relatively tiny step up in rendering power from the 4070, but that hardly matters when you have the brand that most people want.
The RTX 5070 isn't topping the chart, of course, but it's already at number 56 on the Steam Survey, despite only being out for a couple of months – it's already above the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT, which have had years out in the wild now.
There's a lesson here for AMD, which is that if you have the underdog brand, you need to master pricing and marketing, as well as having a competitive product. As I found in my Radeon RX 9070 XT review, it's nailed the latter now with the RDNA 4 architecture – its latest GPU offers fantastic performance, but the real-world pricing needs to bear at least some relation to the MSRP, especially if your competitor is managing it. AMD doesn't stand a chance if its competing GPUs cost over $100 more than the Nvidia equivalents, even if they're better products.
If you are thinking of upgrading your graphics card, check out my full guide on how to enable resizable BAR, so you can make sure you avoid any pitfalls and get the most from your upgrade.
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