AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 Hits Shelves: 32GB of VRAM for Half the Price of NVIDIA’s Blackwell
AMD’s latest powerhouse GPU for AI workloads, the Radeon AI PRO R9700, has officially landed in online listings, boasting 32 GB of GDDR6 memory and a surprisingly aggressive price tag around $1250-nearly half the cost of NVIDIA’s 24 GB RTX PRO 4000 “Blackwell.”
Unveiled at Computex 2025, the R9700 uses the full Navi 48 GPU-the same chip found in the Radeon RX 9070 XT-but it doubles the VRAM to better support today’s increasingly demanding LLMs. Models like GPT-J, LLaMA, and MoE architectures thrive on VRAM, with many requiring 16–28 GB just to run efficiently. AMD’s 32 GB approach targets that sweet spot-and adds headroom.
According to recent retail listings (spotted by Tech-America), the R9700 appears in ASRock and Sapphire variants, priced between $1244–$1277. Given AMD’s hints about a strong performance-per-dollar ratio, this pricing seems in line with their value-first strategy.
When stacked against competitors, AMD’s offering looks especially tempting. The NVIDIA RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell may use newer GDDR7 memory, but it caps out at 24 GB and costs $2499. Meanwhile, NVIDIA’s 32 GB option-the RTX PRO 4500-comes in at a whopping $3799. For many professionals and small studios, that’s simply out of reach.
Yes, AMD’s ROCm software stack still trails NVIDIA’s CUDA ecosystem in some areas. But for AI tasks where VRAM capacity trumps everything-like when fitting large language models or preventing slowdowns from paging to system RAM-the R9700 could be a game changer. Even a single megabyte spilling over to RAM can tank performance by up to 90% depending on system configuration.
Power consumption also tells an interesting story. While the R9700 has a 300W TBP, that’s not far off from NVIDIA’s 140W–200W offerings in this class. The trade-off may be worth it for the VRAM gains alone.
As for Intel’s entry? The upcoming Arc PRO B60 “Battlemage” is expected to offer 24 GB at just $500, but it hasn’t launched yet. AMD has a clear head start-and a competitive edge right now.
The AI workstation race is heating up, and AMD seems to have hit a rare sweet spot: high VRAM, decent performance, and an unbeatable price. Let’s just hope they can deliver the software support to match.