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 story isn't quite that simple.
AMD's own Radeon RX 9070 XT presents a challenge. A mere $50 more expensive, the XT offers significantly better performance. While the price difference aligns with the roughly 8% performance gap between the two cards, the incremental cost for a substantial performance boost makes the RX 9070 a harder sell. Despite this internal competition, AMD still offers a strong contender in the mid-range market.
Purchasing Guide
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 launches March 6th, with a starting price of $549. Expect variations in pricing across different models. To maximize value, aim for a model closest to the base price, given its proximity in price to the superior 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 boasts 56 Compute Units, each with 64 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), totaling 3,584 shaders. Each compute unit includes one Ray Accelerator and two AI Accelerators (56 and 112 total, respectively). These improvements, particularly to ray tracing and AI acceleration, allow the RX 9070 to compete effectively in ray-traced games. Furthermore, the enhanced AI Accelerators enable FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 4, AMD's first foray into AI upscaling.
The RX 9070 features 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit bus, similar to the 7900 GRE, providing ample memory for 1440p gaming for years to come. While GDDR7 would have been a welcome addition, it likely would have increased the price point. AMD recommends a 550W power supply, with a 220W power budget. Testing revealed peak consumption of 249W, suggesting a 600W PSU is a safer bet.
Importantly, AMD isn't releasing a reference design for the RX 9070, meaning all versions will be from third-party manufacturers. This review utilizes the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC 16G, a triple-slot card with a factory overclock.
FSR 4
Since DLSS's emergence, AI upscaling has become a crucial performance enhancer. FSR 4 finally brings this technology to AMD GPUs. 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 the 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 consistently outperforms it at 1440p, demonstrating a 12% average lead. It also significantly surpasses its predecessor, the RX 7900 GRE, by 22%, despite having 30% fewer cores. It's important to note that this review used a factory-overclocked version with a reported boost clock of 2,700MHz (approximately a 7% overclock).
Testing utilized public drivers (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). The RX 9070 shows strong results in 3DMark, particularly in the Steel Nomad test (20% faster than the RTX 5070). In gaming benchmarks, the RX 9070 consistently outperforms the RTX 5070 in titles like *Call of Duty: Black Ops 6*, *Cyberpunk 2077*, *Metro Exodus*, and *Red Dead Redemption 2*. While *Total War: Warhammer 3* and *Black Myth Wukong* show closer performance, the RX 9070 holds its own. *Assassin's Creed Mirage* and *Forza Horizon 5* also showcase significant performance advantages for the RX 9070.
The Radeon RX 9070's superior performance and 16GB VRAM make it a future-proof investment compared to the RTX 5070. Even with comparable performance, the larger VRAM would make the RX 9070 the better value. The combination of better performance and more VRAM makes it a compelling choice.
Test System: 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
