Solid, But You Really Want the XT

AMD’s latest $550 graphics card is a strange beast, and that’s the fault of AMD. The Radeon RX 9070 is a solid brick of gaming potential that can hold up in some 4K scenarios for your desktop PC, though it truly shines for gamers who plan to play at 1440p. Despite that, the RX 9070’s main competition isn’t Nvidia. AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT at $600 offers a major performance bump above the slightly cheaper card. Unless the XT’s prices inflate wildly post launch on March 6, you should opt for the $600 graphics card without hesitation.

On its own, the Radeon RX 9070 is a relatively solid GPU for sub-4K resolution gaming or other intensive graphics rendering tasks. You may have read the same line from reviews of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 that launched on Tuesday. These cards are already equivalent in manufacturer-suggested price. However, in our tests, the RX 9070 has the edge in synthetic benchmarks and in some games. If you want to upgrade your PC and avoid Nvidia’s woeful stock situation, that may sound like music to beleaguered PC gamers’ ears.

Despite those gains over Nvidia, pushing the RX 9070 to 4K with the highest in-game settings will result in too much settings fiddling to be worth the hassle. If your choice is between Nvidia and AMD, you then have to decide if you really want DLSS 4 and multi-frame gen capabilities. If you’re into single-player games and you have a high-refresh rate monitor, it’s a real consideration despite the significant improvements to AMD’s own FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 upscaling software.

The Radeon RX 9070 XT plays ball with the RTX 5070 Ti, but for $150 less MSRP. The RX 9070 performs above Nvidia’s latest RTX 5070 GPU in several benchmarks and games while sharing the $550 price point, and yet it still may not be the one you want if you’re looking to spend less on a GPU. Read on, and I’ll explain more.

AMD’s RDNA 4 Architecture on the Radeon RX 9070 Offers a Solid Baseline for 1440p Performance

AMD’s new graphics cards, or GPUs, run on the company’s recently revealed RDNA 4 architecture. It’s an upgrade over RDNA 3 with new pipelines to improve the speed and performance of the cards’ ray tracing capabilities. Unlike Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture, which itself is passed down from the company’s AI training chips, AMD’s RDNA architecture operates on “computing units.” AMD claims its latest computing units are more efficient than previous generations, meaning it doesn’t need as many inside each package to increase overall performance over the previous generation.

The RX 9070 has the same VRAM specs as the 9070 XT, including 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM with a 644.6 GB/s memory bandwidth. Compare that to the 12 GB of GDDR7 on the RTX 5070, AMD’s card has more headroom for higher resolutions, though that’s brought down by the other specs. The RX 9070 has 56 compute units compared to the RX 9070 XT’s 64. The RX 9070 includes 112 AI accelerators, whereas its more expensive sibling has an additional 16. For $50 less, you get a drop in boost clock speeds from the 9070 XT’s 2.97 to the regular 9070’s 2.51.

At least, the Radeon RX 9070 draws less power at 220 W than the XT’s 304 W. AMD recommends a 550 W minimum PSU for the RX 9070, but if you’re building your desktop from scratch, you may as well go for a 700 W power supply for the sake of future usability and upgrading. That’s also what the Radeon RX 9070 XT suggests you get (as if you needed another hint to aim for the XT instead).

For review, AMD sent us the Acer Nitro Radeon RX 9070 16 GB graphics card. It’s a two-slot, three-fan GPU configuration that looks as common as any other card on the market. It gets the job done, though. The card was grave-silent inside my PC tower, the Origin PC Neuron 3500X. The card includes three DisplayPort 2.1 ports and a single HDMI 2.1 port. You certainly don’t need any bloatware like Acer Intelligence Space, but luckily the card did not automatically install any unwanted software on my PC once I slotted it in.

Unlike Nvidia, AMD doesn’t offer any first party Founders Edition graphics cards, so thermals, layout, and other technical details will vary from card to card. Also unlike Nvidia, AMD sticks with the dual 8-pin power connectors to power the GPU. At least you shouldn’t have to worry about all that hullabaloo surrounding claims of melted power connectors on the RTX 5090. Anyway, you shouldn’t really complain too much about plugging in two power connectors rather than a single 12VHPWR cable.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 Manages Performance Gains Over Nvidia’s RTX 5070

We ran our AMD and Nvidia benchmarks all on the same PC. Our specs included an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K CPU and 32 GB of DDR5, 6400 MT/s RAM. It’s what managed to power the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, so it was more than up to the job of AMD’s $550 graphics card.

Benchmarks love AMD’s cards. 3D Mark and Geekbench AI shows the lower-level RX 9070 beating Nvidia’s RTX 5070 in several scenarios, including those that stress ray tracing capabilities. In 3D Mark Port Royal, the RX 9070 scored 17819 compared to 13835 on the RTX 5070. It also managed to equal the 5070 in 3D Mark Speed Way tests and run 900 points above Nvidia’s latest, low-level GPU in 3D Mark Steel Nomad.

As for AI performance, benchmarks show AMD’s cards hold a strong edge over Nvidia. That’s ironic, considering AI is Nvidia’s whole bread and butter, and is what Blackwell was initially supposed to support. The Radeon RX 9070 issued a 25961 quantified score in Geekbench AI. That’s just 684 points short of the RX 9070 XT, though it’s close to 4,000 points higher than the $750 RTX 5070 Ti.

For gaming, how well each AI processing unit performs is far less important than how graphics card makers use them. We’ll talk about AMD’s improvements to its FSR upscaler later, but what you really want to know is how the RX 9070 performs in game. In our tests, the Radeon RX 9070 managed to beat the RTX 5070 in some games like Horizon Zero Dawn: Remastered, netting 89 FPS at 4K without any help from upscaling and 116 with FSR on balanced settings. This also beat the RTX 5070 Ti.

As for Cyberpunk 2077, the RX 9070 sat at around 18 FPS at 4K, which was only 1 or 2 FPS below the RTX 5070. Even when the game was using AMD’s last-gen upscaling tech FSR 3, the 9070 was able to hit 44 FPS in benchmarks, just above 43 FPS on the RTX 5070 with the game running on Nvidia’s latest version of its upscaler. The Radeon card was also a beast at 1080p compared to the RTX 5070, managing 120 FPS to Nvidia’s 110 FPS with upscaling on balanced settings.

I already mentioned in my RX 9070 XT review that Black Myth Wukong doesn’t like AMD cards nearly as much as AMD. There will still be games that won’t meet or beat Nvidia’s similarly-priced GPU. Other games may struggle slightly compared to Nvidia’s RTX 50-series. For instance, Alan Wake II with FSR 2 enabled and all ray tracing settings turned off won’t even get to 60 FPS at 4K. With ray tracing turned on, I saw framerates in the mid to low 30s.

There are some games, especially those few with FSR 4 support, that truly excel on AMD’s latest. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was managing over 60 FPS even with ray tracing settings on high. In Star Wars Outlaws, with FSR 3 settings enabled, I could hit 80 to 90 FPS average and only take a minor hit when trying out ray tracing.

I also need to mention I experienced hitching and other issues in some games that I can only assume are an issue with pre-release drivers, though AMD didn’t offer clarification on that score before publication. There was frame hitching in Dragon Age: The Veilguard and excessive frame drops in Hogwarts Legacy. I already went into detail with these issues in my RX 9070 XT review, so I won’t stress about them here. Just know AMD’s Adrenalin software is still working out the kinks. That’s fair enough, and Nvidia still hasn’t fully fixed all the issues with black screens on its RTX 50-series cards.

The Radeon RX 9070 Relies More on FSR 4 Than the 9070 XT

I’m happy there are more, slightly cheaper options for GPUs nowadays. Let’s not forget Intel’s Battlemage lineup from last year, which offered a true budget GPU for playing at 1080p or up to 1440p resolutions. Everybody likes options, and the RX 9070 is certainly a contender at its price point. Still, I can’t say it should be your first choice.

AMD gets a reputation for championing hardware while letting its software struggle, at least compared to Nvidia. Well, Nvidia’s an AI company before it was a gaming hardware company, so that’s not too surprising. It’s also an unfair comparison. Both AMD and Nvidia have long competed to sponsor games and shove their exclusive graphics tech into the latest and greatest titles. AMD’s FSR 4, now enabled by the AI accelerators on RDNA 4, is an improvement over the last generation of software. It’s certainly not as flashy as all the talk of a transformer model DLSS 4 and multi-frame gen. For the sake of stable framerates on these mid-range GPUs, FSR 4 is more than enough.

The only issue is there are so few games that currently support it. It’s available in all of Sony’s PlayStation 5 to PC ports, along with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Monster Hunter Wilds, Kingdom Come Deliverance II, and Civilization VII. That may sound like a full slate until you compare it to the 75+ games that support DLSS 4 at launch, and Nvidia’s only been adding more support over the last two months. AMD has a lot of catching up to do.

But what does that mean for the RX 9070? A lower-level GPU depends more on AI upscaling to hit the highs you need it to. Even with that support, we doubt that 4K will always be within your grasp on this $550. In that way, it’s great for 1440p, just as much as the RTX 5070 was. Only, in that case, there are more games to choose from that support upscaling. The growing number of games that support multi-frame gen make Nvidia’s RTX 5070 a slightly more compelling target for this price point. As disappointing as Nvidia’s performance gains were, there’s a compelling reason to get that card instead of the RX 9070 at that price point.

But that doesn’t matter, since the RX 9070 XT exists for just $50 more. With the stock situation still uncertain before the next-gen Radeon launch on March 6, I suggest you don’t opt for the RX 9070 unless you can find it at its lowest price. If you can find the RX 9070 XT at or close to $600, there’s no question that it should be the card you grab first.