TECH NEWS – There are rumours of supply shortages and driver problems, but these don’t seem to be the reasons why the AMD RX 7900 may not make it to China.

According to the latest rumours, the number one reason AMD’s new Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT cards won’t be making an appearance in China is that the red team has stuck the words “Made in Taiwan” on the boxes!

This would be entirely justified, given that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has been instrumental in creating the exciting new RDNA 3 GPUs packed into AMD’s new cards.

And China, as we all know, is a little annoyed that the little island off its coast is not just referred to as “China”.

The main report comes from Videocardz, which cites sources on Chiphell forums and Bilibilli. They talk about availability and the “small island problem”.

It remains to be seen whether this is a coincidence on AMD’s part or a conscious decision to stand by its GPU and CPU vendor partner in the middle of a diplomatic imbroglio. On the one hand, it is not the wisest move from a business point of view, but on the other hand, it would be a respectable one.

However, it’s a good question that if the situation is so tense, how will the actual Taiwanese brands such as Asus, MSI and Gigabyte manage to ship products to China?

Although it’s entirely conceivable that since their graphics cards, laptops, etc., are primarily assembled and packaged in China, this is not necessarily a concern.

It was previously revealed that Nvidia is rumoured to be cutting the price of the RTX 4080 due to poor sales. According to sources, this is more due to a boost in the number of cards sold than anything to do with AMD’s competing RX 7900 series cards. Reportedly, the red team is already having trouble getting the many starter GPU kits out into the wild, even outside China.

It also mentions that one of their sources detailed some specific driver issues, such as memory leaks, that are affecting performance and preventing third-party cards from getting out the door and into stores.

In recent years, getting supplies on the shelves has always been a problem. It is challenging to meet the initial demand. AMD may already be having trouble keeping enough GPUs in stock. Given the potential issues within China (e.g. Covid closures, protests), it is easy to imagine that there is no political or ideological reason why the cards have not yet reached their destination.

Source: Videocardz

The ref 7900XTX/7900XT package is marked as ‘made in Taiwan’. This wording does not meet the current standards in mainland China, so AMD needs to prepare a new version of the package specifically for mainland China. 👀

— MEGAsizeGPU (@Zed__Wang) December 6, 2022