After AMD’s RX 9070 XT presentation, I can safely say even this Nvidia die-hard believes the hype

I’ve been a fan of AMD’s CPUs for some time, but I’ve never made the move over to its graphics cards. With Nvidia being the market leader, some system requirements don’t even list its competitors, and this has led me to (perhaps unfairly) looking over them in favour of Nvidia.

I’ve always felt like the number of devs creating games with Nvidia’s technologies in mind has been a bit higher, and I have never really had the time to fully dig into if that’s true. As shameless as it may be to admit, Nvidia cards have always been just fine for me, and I’ve never felt the need for my eyes to wander elsewhere.

However, that might have just changed for me. The RTX 50-series is in a very strange spot, with some cards missing ROPs, and some cards facing black screen issues. The RTX 5090 coming in at $2,000, with the next most expensive card launching at $999, is an awful lot of money for an upgrade that, while impressive, may not feel all that much bigger to those on 40-series cards. This is especially true if you don’t plan on using Multi Frame Gen. This is all at MSRP as well, which many of these cards are unlikely to sell at for a few months.

AMD itself had made a few blunders in the GPU department, too. We were anticipating details on the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT launch way back at CES 2025 and didn’t really get that. Nvidia sort of stole the show with performance figures, pricing, and launch windows and left AMD scrabbling around for another date to spill the beans.

Following the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 immediately selling out, AMD announced it would have a wide assortment of cards available for its launch in March, but it needed to actually convince prospective buyers to get their order in. There was plenty of ground for AMD to crawl back market share, and its presentation would be its chance of doing so. Within just 30 minutes of showing its new cards, I was more convinced than I’d ever been.

After some technical figures on RDNA 4, AMD’s latest GPU architecture, it gave real information on how much better it performs rasterisation and ray tracing than previous cards. Crucially, it showed how this advanced GPU tech makes the cards perform better and how FSR 4, AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s DLSS 4, is being implemented. Like FSR 3, it can upscale frames and implement frame generation for higher fps, and this is all finished off with AMD’s anti-lag software, so all those ‘fake frames’ don’t add too much latency.

The acknowledgement of FSR 4 is a necessary part of the presentation, given Multi Frame Gen is one of the biggest new upgrades in the Nvidia RTX 50-series. However, none of this is what convinced me.

The thing that really sold me on the potential of the RX 9070 and 9070 XT cards isn’t these upgraded software techniques, it’s how well worded and precisely antagonistic the presentation felt. The RX 9070 XT outperforms the RX 7900 GRE at 4K by anywhere between 20% to 60%, but it also shows a 2% bump above the RTX 5070 Ti with overclocked cards of its 9070 XT card. Where AMD could have just compared performance to previous AMD cards, it instead directly references the 5070 Ti and says, “The 9070 XT, powered by RDNA 4, is able to deliver fantastic performance for $150 less”.

This is followed up by saying, “Across some of the most popular titles, the 9070 XT is the best choice for your next gaming PC when looking at raw gaming performance”.

This comparison isn’t fully straightforward as overclocked cards are being pushed beyond the normal limits and, therefore, offer better performance at the expense of thermals and power demands, neither of which are noted here. It is also comparing ‘native’ performance, so this is presumably without upscaling—something Nvidia cards perform well. But beating out a $749-going-on-$999 card that many can’t even get their hands on for $599 is one hell of a selling point.

Now, we’re still waiting for performance to come out for both AMD’s cards and Nvidia’s upcoming $549 card (the RTX 5070), but AMD has made hay while the sun shines. This feels like one of the best chances it’s had in some time to bring the fight to Nvidia, and it has really grasped the opportunity. AMD ignoring the high-end but focusing on these specific price points could be what wins out for it in the long-term.

As someone who only recently upgraded to the RTX 4070 Super, I’m not currently in the market for an upgrade, but if I were, I think this is the most I’d ever be tempted to go for that full Team Red build.