AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX: Performance Benchmarks

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 enters the graphics card market at an interesting juncture. Hot on the heels of Nvidia's latest generation, this $549 card directly competes with the underwhelming GeForce RTX 5070. AMD easily wins this matchup, making the RX 9070 a compelling choice for 1440p gaming.

However, the situation isn't entirely straightforward. AMD's own Radeon RX 9070 XT, a superior performer, sits only $50 higher. While the 9070's approximately 8% slower performance aligns with its 9% lower price, the small price difference makes the 9070 XT a hard proposition to ignore for many. Despite this, AMD's offerings still present a strong showing for Team Red.

Purchasing Guide

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 launches March 6th, with a starting price of $549. Expect variations in pricing across different models. Prioritize purchasing a model as close to the starting price as possible, given its proximity in price to the significantly faster RX 9070 XT.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 – Photos

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Specs and Features

Like the RX 9070 XT, the RX 9070 utilizes the new RDNA 4 architecture. This results in substantial performance gains, significantly outpacing the previous generation Radeon RX 7900 GRE despite having 30% fewer compute units.

The RX 9070 boasts 56 Compute Units, each containing 64 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), totaling 3,584 shaders. Each compute unit includes one Ray Accelerator and two AI Accelerators, amounting to 56 and 112 respectively. These improved Ray and AI Accelerators significantly enhance ray tracing capabilities. Furthermore, the enhanced AI Accelerators enable FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 4, bringing AI upscaling to AMD GPUs for the first time.

The card features 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit bus—similar to the 7900 GRE—sufficient for 1440p gaming for years to come. While GDDR7 adoption would have been beneficial, it likely would have increased the cost.

AMD recommends a 550W power supply, with a 220W power budget. Testing revealed a peak consumption of 249W; therefore, a 600W PSU is recommended for safety.

Importantly, unlike previous generations, AMD isn't releasing a reference design. All RX 9070 cards will be manufactured by third-party board partners. This review utilized the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC 16G, a triple-slot card with a factory overclock.

FSR 4

Since DLSS's rise in 2018, AI upscaling has become crucial for performance optimization without significant image quality loss. FSR 4 finally brings this capability to AMD GPUs.

FSR 4 utilizes previous frames and in-game data, processing them through an AI model to upscale lower-resolution images to the native resolution. This differs from FSR 3's temporal upscaling, which lacked AI detail refinement, resulting in artifacts.

Due to the computational demands of the AI model, FSR 4 introduces a slight performance reduction compared to FSR 3. For example, in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 at 1440p (Extreme preset), FSR 3 achieved 165 fps, dropping to 159 fps with FSR 4. Similar results were seen in Monster Hunter World.

The Adrenalin software allows users to toggle between FSR 3 and FSR 4, prioritizing either performance or image quality.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT & 9070 – Benchmarks

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Performance

At $549, the RX 9070 directly challenges the RTX 5070, consistently outperforming it. At 1440p, it's 12% faster on average, and 22% faster than the RX 7900 GRE. This represents a significant improvement, especially considering the 30% reduction in cores.

Note: This review used a factory-overclocked RX 9070 (Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC) with a reported 2,700MHz boost clock (approximately 7% overclock).

Testing utilized publicly available drivers (Nvidia Game Ready driver 572.60 and AMD Adrenalin 24.12.1, with review drivers for the RX 9070, RX 9070 XT, and RTX 5070).

The RX 9070 demonstrates strong performance in 3DMark, particularly in Steel Nomad (20% faster than the RTX 5070). In gaming benchmarks:

• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6: 165 fps (1440p, FSR 3 Balanced) – 26% faster than the RTX 5070.
• Cyberpunk 2077: Slightly outperforms the RTX 5070 at 1440p with Ray Tracing Ultra.
• Metro Exodus: 71 fps (1440p, no upscaling) – 11% faster than the RTX 5070.
• Red Dead Redemption 2: 142 fps (1440p, max settings, Vulkan) – 23% faster than the RTX 5070.
• Total War: Warhammer 3: Comparable performance to the RTX 5070 at 1440p.
• Assassin's Creed Mirage: 193 fps (1440p, Ultra preset, FSR Balanced) – 18% faster than the RTX 5070.
• Black Myth Wukong: Comparable performance to the RTX 5070 at 1440p.
• Forza Horizon 5: 185 fps (1440p) – 12% faster than the RTX 5070.

The RX 9070's superior performance compared to the RTX 5070 at the same price point is impressive. Its 16GB of VRAM also provides a future-proofing advantage. Even with comparable performance, the significantly larger VRAM makes the RX 9070 the better value proposition.