AMD has just taken the fight to Nvidia with its pricing for the RX 9070-series and I’m here for it

Competition is important. Nvidia has been the dominant force in GPUs for some time now, and AMD has felt like it’s been on the backfoot, struggling to keep up. And while I’m not saying that AMD has now miraculously gained the upper hand, it just announced a pair of mid-range graphics cards with impressive claimed performance figures in the middle of an Nvidia RTX 50-series supply shortage—for much more reasonable money than we might have expected.

$599 for the RX 9070 XT and $549 for the RX 9070. Not insignificant sums, no doubt, but significantly lower than we were otherwise fearing. And price matters, especially when it comes to the mid-range market.

That comes with a promise of “wide availability”, which really is key if AMD wants to make a dent in Nvidia’s enviable GPU market share. It’s extremely difficult to get hold of an RTX 50-series GPU right now for reasonable money, or indeed, at all.

And while the performance we’ve seen so far from the RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 Ti has been relatively impressive (primarily due to the benefits of DLSS 4’s Multi Frame Generation), a set of performant, mid-range, reasonably priced cards from its biggest competition could shake things up in the GPU market in all the right ways.

Of course, that DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation benefit is not an easy thing to sweep away. While the new AMD cards were announced alongside FSR 4 (now enhanced with machine learning) and AFMF 2.1 for frame rate enhancing bolt-ons, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be able to bump up the smoothness of your games to quite the same extent.

Nor is it likely to achieve the same image quality as DLSS 4 in one bite of the machine learning cherry.

But the raw specifications for the new AMD cards make all the right noises. While we’re technically looking at a small number of CUs compared to some of the previous generation RDNA 3 cards (64 for the RX 9070 XT and 56 for the RX 9070), AMD is making a big deal of the claimed improvements to the RDNA 4 versions, alongside some beefed up RT accelerators for much-improved ray tracing performance and some very healthy-looking boost clocks.

AMD’s performance claims are significant, too. While we’ve only got the RX 7900 GRE to compare the standard-edition cards to for now (and the usual percentage-based bar graph, not raw frame rate numbers), it’s not like AMD’s RDNA 3-based upper mid-range card is slow, and the RX 9070 XT looks to give it a bit of a thrashing in a variety of games at both 4K and 1440p.

AMD also showed off an extra slide comparing an overclocked RX 9070 XT to a standard RTX 5070 Ti, in which it claims a 2% performance lead on average over the $749 card in 30+ games. It’s not exactly an apples to apples comparison, but an impressive claim nonetheless.

These are AMD’s own figures, so take them with the appropriate handful of salt. Still, while the RTX 50-series cards have decent raw rasterisation performance on average compared to the RTX 40-series cards, it looks like—on a rough interpretation of AMD’s own figures—that the RX 9000-series cards might give Nvidia’s offerings a run for their money, especially once you factor in performance per dollar.

We haven’t tested the RTX 5070 yet, however. That’s potentially Nvidia’s ace up its sleeve, as not only will it launch for $549 (providing you can get hold of one at MSRP, of course) but Nvidia claims it’ll deliver a ~20% performance bump over the RTX 4070. Add Multi Frame Generation into the mix, and it may cruise ahead of the RX 9000-series cards thanks to all those AI-generated frames.

On that note: Not everyone is happy with the idea of their future frame rate being largely dependent on AI-based insertions. If raw rasterisation performance matters more to you, then AMD may be in a position to deliver the best raw raster bang for your buck.

That’s still speculation at this point, however. We won’t know for sure until we strap both AMD and Nvidia’s mid-range offerings into our test rigs.

Ultimately though, it’s about competition. One company dominating any market is never a good thing for the end consumer, as it lets prices run wild and cuts down on the freedom of choice for the people who matter, in this case, gamers parting with their hard-earned cash.

AMD has just announced a pair of GPUs that may deliver exactly what’s needed to shake things up—a set of compelling alternatives for a price that’s hard to ignore.

The game is afoot, and I can’t wait to see how it all plays out. While AMD is very unlikely to take a massive chunk out of Nvidia’s market share in a single generation, it’s this exact sort of one-two punch that might give it a bloody nose and help move things towards a more even footing in years to come. We’ll see, but the early signs are promising, at the very least.