AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT review (Asus Prime OC)

AMD has gone big with the new Radeon RX 9070 XT, and I don’t just mean because it’s an absolutely monstrously large GPU. This is the first time in a very, very long time where AMD is releasing a brand new graphics card that isn’t just toeing the same line Nvidia has already drawn in the sand.

The new RDNA 4 card is doing the thing we’ve been wanting AMD to do for the longest time: Take Nvidia to task on price and deliver a graphics card that can genuinely outperform its nearest rival. For too long, AMD has been happy to follow the green team’s lead, happy to price its own cards to match up with the tiering structure of the GeForce cards and the feed off the same ludicrous pricing for its own GPUs.

But something happened at CES this year. AMD was all set to announce its RDNA 4-powered RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics cards, and then all we got from its keynote was a promise we’d hear about its new cards later in the year. When, later that day, Nvidia announced its own new generation of cards with the promise of RTX 4090 performance for $549 in the RTX 5070, it became clear just why AMD was going back to the drawing board for a minute.

Straight after the AMD conference I went backstage to talk to David McAfee and Frank Azor, and the mood was certainly downbeat. There was clearly some consternation at the cards not having a reveal during the event, and a desire to explain AMD’s plans for the GPUs, too. But they talked a good game, about efficiency of design and a need to hit a price point that made sense to gamers. The phrase “gamer-first” was even used a few times.

“So the cliche thing is,” Frank Azor tells me, “oh, we listen to our customers. I mean, that’s what I don’t want to kind of come across and say, but we really did try to go to the drawing board on this and say, ‘okay, how do we build a gamer-first, a customer-first type of card?’ Because, you know, the opposite sometimes has been true. We’ve been doing what we think we need to go do, and maybe we didn’t listen as much to the market as we should have. And, you know, the third time’s charm. This is kind of the fourth time.”

Well, AMD is today certainly showing it’s listening to the market; a market that’s crying foul of the extreme pricing that’s been levied on graphics cards in recent times. By launching the RX 9070 XT with a $599 MSRP, it’s just a little more expensive than the RTX 5070 and essentially performs at the same level as the RTX 5070 Ti. And, if AMD can keep a handle on the prices its partners tack onto the Radeon cards they sell, then it has the potential to be one of the most consequential Radeon GPU releases in history.

Yeah, so long as the AIBs and retailers don’t get greedy again…

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT verdict

AMD’s done a lot with this first set of RDNA 4 graphics cards, not a little of it is the introduction of machine learning (ML) for its latest iteration of the FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaler. That’s a vital piece of the future performance vs image quality conundrum for AMD, even if it is limited to the RX 9000-series cards for now.

But it’s also essentially just following Nvidia’s lead in the upscaler race. It’s matching the same AI-based ethos for advancing PC graphics, and ensuring that its GPUs going forward now contain the same sort of matrix processing hardware necessary to make that happen. It’s proven to be effective with the titles I’ve seen in action on the RX 9070 XT, and AMD has seemingly done a great job so far of bringing ML-based upscaling into its own ecosystem.

In a way it’s the same story on the improved ray tracing front, too. Its new RT accelerators have been expanded to the point where you are almost getting the same performance as the new RTX 50-series cards. Largely because it’s following a similar path to getting maximum ray tracing performance out of its GPUs.

It’s where AMD is pushing its own agenda where the RX 9070 XT really shines, though, and I hate to be that guy who’s obsessed with the price of a thing, but it’s all about the market positioning of this card. It’s a brave company who undercuts the competition with a card it could have legitimately sold for at least $100 more and no-one would have batted an eyelid.

Which I am assuming is what AMD’s board partners feel, too, because most of them are happily hiking well above that MSRP in retail. This is going to be the biggest issue for both AMD and the RX 9070-family cards: what the AIBs do with pricing going forward.

AMD has spoken about creating a card for PC gamers, and acknowledging that the $1,000 mark is not where most people will buy a GPU. Even talking about its engineering teams working hard to deliver a “highly performant and efficient design that enables an SEP under $700.” Well, the suggested price might be well under $700, but we’ve got an XFX Merc RX 9070 XT—which was bizarrely meant to be our initial review card—that has a retail price of $729.

This Asus Prime RX 9070 XT OC Edition is more reasonable, though, thankfully: The Prime version is the MSRP entry level card at $599. But what will happen after launch? Well, I think we can be pretty confident that, with the demand these cards are going to generate, someone will sniff an opportunity to price gouge.

I know some manufacturers are just seeing the MSRP of their reference-priced cards as a launch day thing and will be hiking prices after the Thursday release date.

Which is a huge shame, because for the first time in recent history, AMD is really walking the walk in terms of making a gamer-first GPU with a genuinely challenging set price point. It’s also a shame it didn’t create an MBA reference card to drive home the point about its MSRP. Maybe AMD was funnelled down this path because for this generation it doesn’t have a specific high-end strategy to point to, but in the end the reasoning behind the decision to attack Nvidia on price matters less than what is actually happening in our gaming PCs.

This is the sort of generational improvement we’ve been craving; actual rendering performance dropping down a full GPU tier, and not just being propped up by (admittedly very effective) frame generation trickery. Compared with the similarly priced RTX 5070, you’re looking at a card that is over 20% faster on average. Sure, the Nvidia card can call upon Multi Frame Generation—and it is an effective performance panacea when it is supported by a game, and works well—but when the prices are so close I’m going to side with the GPU that will always give me more straight performance for my money.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT specs

The new RDNA 4 architecture could be seen as something of a backwards step for AMD, given that the previous, RDNA 3 generation introduced us to chiplet GPUs for the very first time in gaming. We’re back to a monolithic GPU architecture for the RX 9000-series, however, with very much a focus more on nailing performance per dollar at the volume end of the market than fancy new GPU tech at the high end.

Still, I hope AMD doesn’t completely abandon the drive for chiplets in GPUs, and fingers crossed they make a reappearance down the line, but I’m absolutely here for making a graphics card that caters to the now, and does so at a decent price.

“I would say number one priority is focusing on improving performance in the areas that gamers care about most,” David McAfee told me when we spoke at CES. “And I think in this generation you’ll see it as big ray racing improvements, big ML Ops improvements, for things like FSR 4 and ML Super Resolution.”

And that’s absolutely the bedrock of this generation. Andy has gone into some depth about the new RDNA 4 architecture in his breakdown of the tech, but aside from the work that has been put into improving the raster performance of the new cards—hence that the 64 CUs of the RX 9070 XT are so effective in gaming terms compared with older, higher CU-count RDNA 3 GPUs—it’s the ray tracing and machine learning boost that are going to be the most telling features of RDNA 4.

The enhanced matrix processing capabilities baked into the CU, with proper dedicated AI accelerator matrix units, means the new GPUs are able to make the jump to a machine learning upscaler in FSR4. This is where the big break is going to be between this generation and the last: access to that matrix hardware.

But, honestly, it’s the ray tracing enhancements that come across most clearly when I’ve been looking at how the new cards perform. The third-gen RT accelerators now include a second intersection engine, and that allows for double the ray/box and double ray/triangle testing performance. There’s also an added ray transform unit in there, too, to help increase the performance of the Ray Accelerators when parsing through the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) which makes up a large part of a ray tracing workload.

AMD is also taking a slightly different approach to BVH, called Oriented Bounding Boxes. It’s a method of working through the BVH data in a more efficient manner, which reduces the complexity of the data, putting less strain on the available video memory and memory bandwidth of the GPU.

Basically, AMD is getting pretty good at ray tracing now. You can see from this benchmark in Cyberpunk 2077—one of the most RT heavy games around—running at 4K in the RT Ultra settings, and with a simple overclock enabled, the RX 9070 XT has seriously improved.

Though, if you look at the early path tracing demo it showed off, the Toy Shop demo, you’ll see it still has a little way to go to get onto exactly the same level as Nvidia has. Yes, AMD is still playing catchup to a certain extent.

“I would say the second priority,” McAffee continued, “is every part of the architecture is designed for efficiency. And efficiency is a really broad word. I’m not necessarily talking about performance per watt. I’m sure performance per watt is part of that, but it’s also about making sure that the manufacturing process, the design decisions, like all of that, is incredibly cost optimized to deliver the best value to the end user.”

This is where the monolithic die stuff comes in. While, in the future, having a single GPU compute chiplet that can be added onto a package in multiples will be the most cost-effective method of getting a high-end graphics card together, we’re not there yet. Until then, using a mature TSMC N4P node and a more straightforward monolithic design is going to be the more straightforward play.

This Navi 48 GPU is a surprisingly chonky beast, though—matching the scale of the graphics cards themselves. At 357mm² the chip is not far off the size and scale of the GB203 inside both the RTX 5070 Ti and the RTX 5080, though it does contain far more transistors. In fact, there’s so much logic inside the GPU I am surprised AMD has been able to be so “cost optimized” with this chip to allow it out at the $599 MSRP.

Though, as we’ll see, that talk of MSRP is slightly fraught.

Alongside the GPU is 16 GB GDDR6, running at 20 Gbps across an aggregated 256-bit bus, which offers up 645 GB/s of memory bandwidth. That’s essentially the same memory system as was used to great effect in the RX 7800 XT, and we’re also looking at the same 64 MB of Infinity Cache, too.

Finally, it’s worth noting this card has a relatively high total board power, at 304 W. That extra four watts is a bit of an oddity, and does incidentally make it a more power-hungry card than the RTX 5070 Ti at 300 W. And that does bite into that performance efficiency chat.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT performance and benchmarks

If you came here to find out if AMD’s $599 RX 9070 XT could really stand toe-to-toe with Nvidia’s nominally $749 RTX 5070 Ti then you’ve come to the right place. That would be a ‘yes’ from me.

At worst, the Radeon GPU averages out at 5% slower than the more expensive Nvidia card at 4K. Though, in reality it’s far more up and down than that on a game-by-game basis. Cyberpunk 2077, with its heavy ray tracing usage, is far tougher on the RDNA 4 card despite its improved RT accelerators. Yes, the gap is closing, but it’s clear in Cyberpunk, and in 3DMark’s Port Royal test, that AMD’s still a little behind the green team on straight RT performance.

But it’s not always the case—F1 24 has ray tracing baked into the Ultra setting and yet the difference between the cards is never more than a few frames per second.

Elsewhere the two cards trade blows, but where it’s about pure raster performance, often that is where the RX 9070 XT shines. It’s a big hitter in Total War: Warhammer 3 and when I tried out Kingdom Come Deliverance II to see how it fared with FSR4 I was hugely impressed with how it performed at 4K natively.

Less impressed with FSR4, I’ll admit, because KCDII has itself some real issues with something to do with AMD’s current drivers, because it was a heinous crash-fest when trying to mess around with upscaling.

But FSR4 looks pretty decent from the limited time I’ve had with the new upscaler, and from the limited games it’s enabled in. None of the games on our standard GPU test suite have been enabled with the feature as yet, so we’ve had to go outside of that to give it a look. KCDII was obviously not a hit, but I’m familiar with Horizon Zero Dawn from using it in our previous suite.

And I will admit that I am struggling to see the real difference between the game running at native 4K or in FSR4 Performance mode. It’s detailed and crisp, with none of the muddiness or impermanence that I have otherwise associated with AMD’s upscaling. I often felt like I could tell when FSR was enabled previously, but the stability of the image is excellent in the implementations I’ve seen so far.

FSR4 Frame Generation, however, might still be a work in progress. Sure, it delivered higher frame rates in HZD Remastered, but the stuttering that it introduced was bizarre and utterly game breaking. And not something I’ve seen in any of the FSR3 frame gen tests I’ve carried out with the card.

But it’s this—for want of better phraseology—real-world performance of the card that really highlights how well it performs against the competition. With all the frame rate-enhancing features enabled on both the RX 9070 XT and the RTX 5070 Ti there is nothing between the two cards, or a relatively convincing lead for the AMD card.

You might say the upscaling and frame generation capabilities of the Radeon GPU in the games we’ve tested are not as visually effective as the Nvidia equivalent. And I would kinda agree; I personally prefer the image quality of DLSS and its Frame Generation, but it’s not so far away the relative pricing would have me siding with the far more expensive RTX 5070 Ti instead if I’m on a budget.

You will need to make sure you have the space for the new AMD card, however, because these are big ol’ graphics cards. That makes them cool, for sure, but the chip chilling required to keep these large GPUs happy is certainly hefty. They can also get quite chatty when the GPU hotspot and VRAM temps take a turn over 80 °C. The standard GPU temps are pretty chill, but there are absolutely toasty parts of these GPUs.

Though you really ought to take advantage of the overclocking potential of this card, as it’s continuing a 2025 theme of new GPUs actually being worth tweaking, and that doesn’t mean either maxing out on temps or power draw, either. This Asus Prime card is essentially its entry level model shroud, and even this allows me to pick a -120 mV undervolt to bump those average clock speeds above the 3 GHz mark. That means it can deliver the same level of performance as that $729 XFX unit.

It’s a different situation to overclocking the RTX Blackwell cards, where you have to knock back the voltage in order to unleash the potential higher clockspeeds the Navi 48 GPU has at its disposal. Give it some extra power, too, and a slight bump on the memory speeds and you can get a decent extra performance boost. Honestly, though, you will see more out of the straight RX 9070 than this XT version because of its lower initial clock speeds.

Which is interesting, because overclocking the RX 9070 meant I got within 5% of the performance of the XT model. So, don’t feel like you’re going to be missing out too much if you can’t find your way to getting this card over its slightly cheaper sibling.

PC Gamer test rig
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D | Motherboard: Gigabyte X870E Aorus Master | RAM: G.Skill 32 GB DDR5-6000 CAS 30 | Cooler: Corsair H170i Elite Capellix | SSD: 2 TB Crucial T700 | PSU: Seasonic Prime TX 1600W | Case: DimasTech Mini V2

AMD Radeon RX 9070 TX Analysis

The important thing for this generation is just what happens to the retail price of the cards once they’re actually released. Will this $599 MSRP stick when it comes to gamers actually wanting to get their hands on these new Radeon GPUs? And will AMD be able to manufacture enough of the chonky chips that make up the heart of these cards? For its part, AMD seems confident on the manufacturing side at least. Frank Azor told me at CES “we know how to build graphics cards and chips and very high volumes” to cope with the expected demand. But he also noted he doesn’t think there’s going to be a sudden correction in market share.

“I don’t think that it’s going to be a light switch from one minute to the next that all of a sudden, you know, we go from x amount of market share to 3x that market share. I don’t think that’s going to realistically happen. There’s still a lot of people that are not aware of the AMD Radeon brand.”

The answer on price, however, we already know. Around launch time there will be MSRP cards available—at least while stocks last—but I would bet that almost every one of those reference-priced cards will get a subsequent price bump on their next restock. I know that’s going to happen on at least one of the RX 9070 reference price cards, as the manufacturer has said that $549 figure will be a launch price and will immediately rise by near $100 straight after.

Then we also know there are ludicrously priced cards going on sale at launch, too. We were handed one for this review and had to switch at the last minute once AMD actually admitted the XFX card we had was in fact a $729 GPU and not the $599 option we would have preferred. Thankfully, at least for now, this Asus Prime RX 9070 XT OC is launching at $599 and absolutely delivers.

Still, even as the AIBs do get greedy and slap unfeasible price premiums on the RX 9070 XT, it will still all be relative to the egregious price hikes already stuck onto the Nvidia cards. If $729 is as bad as it gets, that’s still better than the near $1,000 RTX 5070 Ti cards we’ve seen.