It appears that AMD did the good old bait and switch with NVIDIA when it came to the pricing of their Radeon RX 5700 series. The Radeon RX 5700 XT and 5700 pricing was revealed at E3 2019. These prices were to be $449 for the 5700 XT and $379 for the 5700. Of course we all know that NVIDIA swooped in with their new RTX Super Series, which sort of made AMD’s pricing unrealistic. A day before the official launch of the 5700 series AMD changed their pricing to $399 for the 5700 XT and $349 for the 5700. While this may have looked like a reactionary move to the release of NVIDIA Super series, according to a report by PCGamesN AMD has claimed they deliberately announced higher prices to throw NVIDIA off.
Scott Herkelman of AMD goes in the report to say that AMD deliberately announced higher pricing in an effort the throw off NVIDIA, specifically with their Super release:
“[We] made the appropriate move not only to deposition their Super series, but also to log jam their 2060 and 2070. Because we knew that they’re having slower success, and we wanted to do a double Jebait.
We started modeling different competitive scenarios, their [Nvidia’s] die size is quite big, and we knew what they could probably afford in terms of margins and pricing and what they were currently pricing their products at.
We know that they have a tremendous burden on their gross margins. Because their die-size is big and so we just gameplayed SEPs.”
So apparently AMD knew that announcing the Radeon RX 5700 XT and 5700 around the same price as the RTX 2070 and RTX 2060 would mean that NVIDIA would have to be super-aggressive about the pricing of the new Super cards. All while AMD could slash the prices of the 5700 series cards.
What do you guys think?
