It remains to be seen how many people will be interested in buying a Radeon VII when it becomes available next month, but those who do shouldn't have any trouble finding one in stock. So says AMD in response to a rumor that's been making the rounds about its latest graphics card.
Earlier this week, TweakTown said it heard from industry contacts that there will be less than 5,000 Radeon VII cards made, a figure that presumably pointed to launch availability. Since then, AMD has come out and essentially said not to worry, if you're a gamer and want to buy a Radeon VII, you'll be able to.
"While we don't report on production numbers externally, we will have product available via AIB [add-in-board] partners and AMD.com at launch of February 7, and we expect Radeon VII supply to meet demand from gamers," AMD said in a statement.
The Radeon VII is the first consumer gaming card built around a 7-nanometer process GPU. It doesn't offer the same bells and whistles as Nvidia's RTX series, namely real-time ray tracing and DLSS support, but according to AMD's own benchmark figures, it should perform roughly the same as a GeForce RTX 2080 in rasterized games.
We'll be testing that ourselves to see if that's really the case, of course. Assuming it is, it will be interesting to see how gamers respond to the price point—the Radeon VII is priced at $699, the same as a reference GeForce RTX 2080, and $100 cheaper than the Founders Edition model.
One thing that's not entirely clear is if AMD's partners will have custom models available at launch, or if they will all stick to the company's reference design initially.
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