Gaming

Oh, they're absolutely not retaking a huge chunk of the dedicated GPU market. I think what's realistic to expect if they have a good launch (readily available stock, competitive performance and price) is that they may regain a couple points of desktop install base and at least get to sell that they're moving in the right direction instead of abandoning that space altogether. Maybe some growth on handhelds and competitive iGPUs for laptops and tablets so it makes sense for them to continue to develop the gaming GPU business aggressively at least.

That is a rather astonishing mix of really granular quoting of more or less accurate facts and borderline conspiracy theorist level misinformation. You rarely see this stuff outside political channels, I'm... mildly impressed.

AMD absolutely does have stock in back rooms, largely because they have been doing a somewhat undignified dance of waiting to see what Nvidia does to decide what they're pricing their current gen at. Most educated guesses out there are that they were going to price higher, were caught on the wrong foot with Nvidia's MSRP announcement and had to work out how to re-price cards that were already in the retail channel. And now Nvidia is in turn delaying the 5070 to interfere with AMD's new dates. Because both of these companies suck.

On the plus side for consumers, there's some hope that the 9070 will be repriced somewhat affordably and that it won't underperform against at least the 5070, if not the 5070Ti. We'll see what reviews have to say about it.

Your summary of why the launch was so light includes some real stuff (yeah, partners struggle to match Nvidia's aggressive pricing and have terrible margins), but that's not why there was no stock of the 5090 (most reports suggest the GPUs were simply not being manufactured early enough to provide chips to anybody. 5080s were both more readily available and less appealing, so they're easier to find, which kinda pokes big holes in that hypothesis. Manufacturing timelines seem to also explain why restocking will be slow.

I'm also very confused about why you'd "turn off DLSS". Are you allowing people to use FSR, at least? That's a weird proviso. The reason they would misrepresent the impact of MFG is obviously good old marketing. Even if AMD didn't exist, the 40 series does and they have a big issue with justifying a lot of the 50 series line against it. With the 5080 falling well behind the 4090 they have a clear incentive for suggesting you can match the 4090 in cheaper cards. This doesn't tell you anything about the performance of the 9070 one way or the other. It does tell you a lot of the performance of the 5080, though.

See, this is why this sort of propagandistic speech works so well, it takes for ever to even cover all the misrepresentations and all this is going to do is get you to double down on some of these unsubstantiated statements and turn it into a "matter of opinion". It doesn't even need to be on purpose, it's just easier to produce than to counter.

Aaaand now I made myself sad.

In any case, here's hoping the 9070 is a competitive option and readily available. They've apparently scheduled that delayed event for the 28th, so I'll be curious to see what they bring to the table officially.

Nice!