Trust AMD to create an excellent range of high-end graphics cards and then not have enough manufactured to satisfy demand, but that’s exactly what happened with its Radeon R9 Fury series of graphics cards. The Radeon R9 Fury X and R9 Fury launched back in June, while the smaller R9 Nano arrived last month, but supplies weren’t exactly plentiful, forcing prices higher at many retailers. As much as $250 was tacked on to the asking price for some cards, making AMD’s enthusiast range a less than tempting proposition.
At long last AMD looks to be getting on top of situation though, and it’s hoping the supply constraints hitting its R9 Fury series will be largely solved in Q4 2015. Issues in the supply chain with the high bandwidth memory (HBM) used for the graphics cards have been resolved. “Related to the Fury launch we did have some supply constraints in the third quarter. They are largely solved in the fourth quarter, so I don’t think there will be any supply constraints now,” said Lisa Su, AMD’s president during a recent conference call. What this means is we should see the R9 Fury series drop in price, hopefully more in line with RRP. In the case of the Fury X and Nano that’s $649, while the air-cooled R9 Fury should be available for around $549. It’s great to see AMD resolve these problems but it’s come at the cost of losing considerable market share to Nvidia in recent months. It’s issues like this that AMD really can’t afford to happen, particularly when recent estimates showed Nvidia dominating with 82% of the market. At least it’s resolved now in time for the holiday period, which is prime buying time for high-end GPUs.
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