The AMD Radeon RX 9070 enters the graphics card market at an interesting juncture. Hot on the heels of Nvidia's latest generation, this $549 card finds itself directly competing with the underwhelming GeForce RTX 5070. In this matchup, AMD emerges victorious, making the RX 9070 a compelling choice for 1440p gaming. However, the picture isn't entirely straightforward.
AMD's own Radeon RX 9070 XT presents a slight complication. A mere $50 more expensive, the XT offers roughly 8% better performance. While the price difference aligns with the performance gap, the incremental cost is difficult to ignore, especially considering the XT's superior capabilities. Despite this, Team Red still boasts a strong contender in the RX 9070.
Purchasing Guide
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 launches March 6th, with a starting price of $549. Expect variations in pricing across different models. Prioritize purchasing a card as close to the starting price as possible, given its proximity in cost to the more powerful RX 9070 XT.
AMD Radeon RX 9070 – Photos
Specs and Features
Like its sibling, the RX 9070 XT, the RX 9070 utilizes the RDNA 4 architecture. This results in a significant performance leap, surpassing the previous generation Radeon RX 7900 GRE despite having 30% fewer compute units. The card features 56 Compute Units, each with 64 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), totaling 3,584 shaders. Each compute unit includes one Ray Accelerator and two AI Accelerators, for a total of 56 and 112 respectively. These improvements, particularly to ray tracing and AI acceleration, allow the RX 9070 to compete effectively in ray-traced games. The enhanced AI capabilities also enable FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 4, AMD's first foray into AI upscaling.
The RX 9070 incorporates 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit bus—similar to the 7900 GRE—sufficient for 1440p gaming for several years. While GDDR7 would have been a welcome addition, it likely would have increased the cost. AMD recommends a 550W power supply, with a 220W power budget, though testing revealed peak consumption of 249W. A 600W PSU is recommended for safety.
Unlike previous generations, AMD isn't releasing a reference design for the RX 9070. All versions will be from third-party manufacturers. This review utilized the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC 16G, a triple-slot card with a factory overclock.
FSR 4
AI upscaling, popularized by DLSS, significantly boosts performance without substantial image quality loss. FSR 4 brings this technology to AMD GPUs for the first time. Utilizing previous frames and in-game data, an AI model upscales lower-resolution images to the native resolution. This differs from FSR 3's temporal upscaling, which lacked AI detail refinement, leading to artifacts. While FSR 4 introduces a slight performance penalty compared to FSR 3 due to AI processing, the Adrenalin software allows users to choose between the enhanced image quality of FSR 4 or the slightly better performance of FSR 3.
AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT & 9070 – Benchmarks
Performance
Priced identically to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 demonstrates superior performance in many benchmarks at 1440p, exceeding the RTX 5070 by an average of 12% and the RX 7900 GRE by 22%. This is remarkable considering the 30% reduction in cores. It's important to note that the tested RX 9070 was a factory-overclocked version (Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC) with a reported boost clock of 2,700MHz (approximately a 7% increase). All cards were tested using their respective latest public drivers at the time of writing (Nvidia Game Ready driver 572.60 and AMD Adrenalin 24.12.1, with review drivers for the RX 9070, RX 9070 XT, and RTX 5070).
3DMark benchmarks (Speed Way and Steel Nomad) showed a mixed bag, with the RX 9070 essentially tying the RTX 5070 in the ray-traced Speed Way test, but significantly outperforming it (20% lead) in the non-ray-traced Steel Nomad test. Gaming benchmarks revealed consistent advantages for the RX 9070 across various titles, including *Call of Duty: Black Ops 6*, *Cyberpunk 2077*, *Metro Exodus*, *Red Dead Redemption 2*, *Assassin's Creed Mirage*, and *Forza Horizon 5*. While *Total War: Warhammer 3* and *Black Myth Wukong* showed closer results, the RX 9070 still held its own.
The test system used was: CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D; Motherboard: Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero; RAM: 32GB G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo @ 6,000MHz; SSD: 4TB Samsung 990 Pro; CPU Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin III 360.
Ultimately, the Radeon RX 9070's performance advantage over the RTX 5070 at the same price point, coupled with its superior 16GB VRAM, makes it a compelling choice. Even if performance were perfectly matched, the increased VRAM would make the RX 9070 the better value proposition.
