AMD Radeon RX 9070 Review

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 arrives in a weird time for graphics cards. We’re fresh off the launch of Nvidia’s latest generation of cards, which places AMD’s new $549 card in direct competition with the disappointing GeForce RTX 5070. That’s a competition that AMD has no problem winning right now, which would usually make the Radeon RX 9070 the graphics card to buy for 1440p gaming.

Of course it’s a little more complicated than that, and AMD has nothing to blame but itself. The Radeon RX 9070 is only $50 cheaper than the excellent Radeon RX 9070 XT. That price difference makes sense in sheer mathematical terms – the 9070 is about 8% slower and 9% cheaper than the 9070 XT – but it’s hard to justify not just spending the extra 50 bucks to get even better performance. Either way, when it comes down to choosing between two AMD graphics cards, things are looking pretty good for Team Red.

Specs and Features

Just like the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, the RX 9070 is based on the new RDNA 4 graphics architecture. This new graphics tech brings huge improvements to performance, to the point where the 9070 drastically outperforms the Radeon RX 7900 GRE from last generation, despite having 30% fewer compute units.

The Radeon RX 9070 has 56 Compute Units, each with 64 Streaming Multiprocessors, or SMs, making for a total amount of 3,584 shaders. Each compute unit also has one Ray Accelerator and two AI Accelerators, making for 56 and 112 total, respectively. While the SMs do a bulk of the heavy lifting, the improvements to the Ray and AI Accelerators finally make this AMD graphics card able to hold its own in games with ray tracing. Plus, the AI Accelerators have improved enough that AMD was able to introduce FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 4, bringing AI upscaling to AMD graphics cards for the first time.

Just like the 9070 XT, the RX 9070 is paired with 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit bus. That’s pretty much the exact same memory configuration as the 7900 GRE, and should be enough for 1440p gaming for years. However, it would have been nice to see AMD adopt GDDR7, like Nvidia did, but that probably would have brought up the price.

AMD recommends at least a 550W power supply to run the RX 9070, as it has a power budget of 220W. In my testing, though, power consumption peaked at 249W, which is a bit over its budget. That’s not enough to make it require better cooling, per se, but I’d recommend going with at least a 600W PSU, just to be on the safe side.

As for cooling, though, it’s important to keep in mind that AMD is not releasing a reference design of the RX 9070, for the first time in a few generations. That means every version of the Radeon RX 9070 will be manufactured by a third-party board manufacturer. AMD sent me the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC 16G. It’s a beefy triple-slot card with a slight factory overclock, so keep that in mind.

FSR4

Since DLSS blew up in 2018, AI upscaling has been one of the best ways to get better performance without losing too much in the way of image quality. This used to be a solution that was essentially exclusive to Nvidia graphics cards, but the times have changed and FSR 4 brings AI upscaling to AMD GPUs for the first time.

Just like any other similar solution, FSR 4 takes previous frames, along with in-game data, and runs them through an AI model to accurately upscale a lower resolution image back up to your native resolution. This is slightly different from the Temporal upscaling found in previous versions of FSR 3, which didn’t have an AI algorithm to tighten up the details, resulting in artifacts like ghosting.

The downside is that because of the performance costs of running an AI model, FSR 4 has a slight performance loss compared to FSR 3. For instance, in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 at 1440p on the Extreme preset, FSR 3 gets me a frame rate of 165 fps, but switching it over to FSR 4 drops that to 159. Likewise, in Monster Hunter Wilds, the Radeon RX 9070 got 81 fps at 4K max settings with ray tracing enabled, but went down to 76 fps when I switched to FSR 4.

But because there’s a toggle in the Adrenalin software that essentially lets you ‘opt-in’ to FSR 4, you can choose whether you want the better image quality of FSR 4 or the slightly better performance of FSR 3. I mostly play single player games, so I’d go for FSR 4 every day of the week, but you may prefer sticking to FSR 3 for fast-paced online games like Marvel Rivals.

Performance

At $549, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 goes head-to-head with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, and comes out ahead more often than not. At 1440p, this mid-range GPU is on average 12% faster than the RTX 5070, with a 22% lead over its AMD predecessor, the RX 7900 GRE, which launched for the same $549 in 2024. That’s a significant improvement, especially with the 9070 having 30% fewer cores.

However, keep in mind that AMD sent me a factory overclocked version of the RX 9070. The exact specs of the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC haven’t been released at the time of writing, but GPU-Z reports a boost clock of 2,700Mhz, which is about a 7% clock speed boost. That won’t quite be a 7% performance boost, but it should increase frame rates by about 4-5%.

I tested every graphics card on their current public drivers at the time of writing. That means all Nvidia cards were tested on Game Ready driver 572.60, and all AMD graphics cards on Adrenalin 24.12.1. The AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT were tested on review drivers provided by AMD, as was the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 with Nvidia’s review drivers.

The 9070 gets off to a strong start in 3DMark, which gives more of an impression of potential performance, rather than real-world gaming frame rates. In the Speed Way test, which has ray tracing enabled, the 9070 gets 5,828 points, compared to 5,845 points from the RTX 5070, which is essentially a tie. But in Steel Nomad which doesn’t have ray tracing enabled, the 9070 beats Nvidia’s card 6,050 to 5,034 – a 20% difference at the same price.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is literally the game AMD used to preview the 9070 at CES 2025 – I even snuck in an early benchmark in at AMD’s booth – so it’s no surprise that it soars here. At 1440p with FSR 3 set to Balanced, the 9070 gets 165 fps, compared to 131 from the 5070 and 143 from the 7900 GRE. That’s a 26% and 15% lead, respectively.

The result in Cyberpunk 2077 is wild, as it’s a game that’s always favored Nvidia hardware, especially with ray tracing enabled. However, at 1440p with the Ray Tracing Ultra preset, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 outperforms the RTX 5070 by 3%. That’s not much of a lead, but any AMD lead in this game is huge. Especially at the same price.

When I test Metro Exodus, I run it without any kind of upscaling, because it only supports DLSS, and not FSR or XeSS. So instead it’s just raw ray tracing performance. But even here, the Radeon RX 9070 wins the day, getting an average of 71 fps, compared to 64 fps from the RTX 5070. That’s an 11% lead in another game that throws Nvidia’s logo at you as you load into it.

Red Dead Redemption 2 gives the RX 9070 another huge lead, this time using Vulkan. At 1440p with everything maxed out, the 9070 gets 142 fps, compared to just 115 from the RTX 5070, making for an incredible 23% performance lead in favor of Team Red. Though, keep in mind that the 7900 GRE also gets 113 fps with the same settings, so this could be another case of the engine favoring AMD hardware.

In Total War: Warhammer 3, the RX 9070 only has a huge lead at 4K, likely due to the higher frame buffer. Moving down to 1440p, the RTX 5070 catches up, getting 134 fps to the 9070’s 135. That’s within the margin of error.

In Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the RX 9070 gets 193 fps at 1440p with the Ultra preset and FSR set to Balanced. Nvidia has a hard time keeping up, only getting 163 fps in the same test. That’s an 18% lead for the AMD card, though this is another game that has traditionally favored AMD GPUs.

Black Myth Wukong, however, is another game that loves Nvidia hardware, and it ends up being a wash between the Radeon 9070 and the RTX 5070. At 1440p, the RX 9070 gets 67 fps to Nvidia’s 66, and that’s with the hard-to-run Cinematic preset.

Forza Horizon 5 is getting up there in years, but it’s one of those games where high framerates are rewarded. At 1440p, the Radeon RX 9070 averages 185 fps, compared to 168 from the 5070 and 152 from the RX 7900 GRE, making for a 12% and 25% difference, respectively.

Coming out hot on the heels of the GeForce RTX 5070 only works in AMD’s favor. The Radeon RX 9070 and the GeForce RTX 5070 both cost $549, so the fact that AMD is able to pull ahead in so many of the tests is incredibly impressive. What’s more, the Radeon RX 9070 will better stand the test of time, thanks to having 16GB of VRAM, even if it is a little slower than the RTX 5070’s GDDR7. Even if these two graphics cards were perfectly tied – which they’re not – AMD having 33% more VRAM would have made the RX 9070 the better value. Combine that with better performance, and it’s a no-brainer.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra