Maybe There's Hope on the Horizon

If you're someone who is interested in PC building--or like me are looking to build a new PC this year--the news around the GPU market has felt...very chaotic and disappointing.  NVIDIA's release of it's new, flagship RTX 5000 series cards has been an absolute dumpster fire.  Stock has been extremely low and actually being able to obtain a card has been almost impossible--as a result, prices have been astronomical.  Then, there was news of issues--melting power cables and manufacturing errors that led to lower performance for some cards.  To top this all off they stopped producing 40 series cards early in anticipation of the new GPU's--basically, it's a very crap time to be trying to get a GPU.

(Here's a Gamers Nexus video where Steve breaks down the official specs for the 9070/9070XT)

Anyone who is interested in getting a new GPU has been crossing their fingers that AMD's 9070 and 9070 XT release will be much smoother than the 5000 series.  Well, we finally got some seemingly good news on that front.  It was announced that the pricing for the 9070 would be $550 and the 9070XT would be $600.  This is...actually, pretty reasonable (with a ton of caveats of course--AMD will need to have enough stock; tariffs on goods from China are likely to increase which will also have an impact).  I'm hoping that all this turns out to be true.

I'm wanting to build to this summer, so I'm hoping it's the perfect time where the cards have been out long enough that there are plenty and that prices have maybe started to dip a little.  I'm still not 100% sure if I want to stick with an NVIDIA card or switch over to AMD.  I'm wanting to move up to 1440p and have very little interest in ray tracing, so I'm leaning AMD.  My current PC has the first NVIDIA GPU that I've ever had in it (and I'm pretty sure that I probably overpaid for it!).  I have felt like NVIDIA's drivers and software have worked more smoothly than when I had AMD GPU's--I had some issues with their driver updater not working, but I never had any major issues with their GPU's.

C'mon AMD...don't screw this up!