Usually, when a new graphics card is manufactured, board partners are working off a reference design produced by Nvidia, Intel, or AMD as in this case. For the launch of the Radeon RX 9070 series, no such reference card was produced for the public eye, though there was one supposedly leaked. In any case, a recent interview with AMD GM David McAfee has some answers concerning why Team Red stuck to partner cards.

YouTube channel HotHardware hosted a long interview with AMD Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Client Channel business. The interview, conducted by Dave Altavilla and Marcio Chiapetta of HotHardware, covered a range of topics relating to AMD’s recent hardware releases such as the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and its new Radeon GPUs.

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AMD is happy to work more closely with board partners instead

One of the questions concerned the lack of a reference card for the Radeon RX 9070 cards. “To be a successful launch, we felt it really needed to be led by our partners,” McAfee explained, “In the past we would focus on AMD-designed and built cards and those would be the launch vehicle with cards from all of our partners to follow.”

“One of the most fundamental things about this launch that was different is we really felt like, to be sucessful in this launch, it had to be a launch that was led by our partners. In the past, we would focus on AMD-designed and built cards and those would be the launch vehicle with cards from all of our partners to follow. But in this case, it was exclusively done through all of our partners, and what that meant was, we engaged with our partners much, much, earlier.”

David McAfee, Corporate VP and General Manager, Client Channel Business at AMD

The RX 9070 launch was described by Mcafee as a “unique launch,” which changed the procedure somewhat. “We engaged with our partners much earlier. We did co-engineering work for almost a year with our partners to make sure that we had optimized every part of the board.”

He went on to describe the work that has been done on the thermals, performance, and components during the co-engineering process to make the RX 9070 series what it is now. “It's not just the chip that we build that powers these graphics cards.”

McAfee also addressed the price point of the cards, pointing to the amount of engineering time that went into developing these cards. Of course, we all know that time is money, and such an investment into the engineering process would need to be recouped somehow.

By working closely with board partners, AMD avoided the need for a reference card, since board partners were already heavily involved in the design and engineering process.

About the Author

Rebecca Hills-Duty

Writing and journalism experience at VRFocus, UploadVR, The Escapist, HTC, PC Gamer, Tech Radar+ and Dexerto. Can sometimes be found playing with retro tech.