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, only $50 more expensive, presents a tough competitor. While the 9070 is approximately 8% slower and 9% cheaper than its XT sibling, the marginal cost difference makes the superior performance of the XT hard to ignore. Despite this internal competition, AMD's offerings remain strong.

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 this starting price as possible, given its proximity in price to the Radeon RX 9070 XT.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 – Photos

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Specs and Features

Like the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, the RX 9070 utilizes the new RDNA 4 architecture. This significantly boosts performance, surpassing the previous generation Radeon RX 7900 GRE by a considerable margin 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, resulting in 56 and 112 respectively. While SMs handle the majority of processing, improvements to Ray and AI Accelerators enable competitive ray tracing performance. The enhanced AI Accelerators facilitate the introduction of FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 4, bringing AI upscaling to AMD GPUs for the first time.

Similar to the 9070 XT, the RX 9070 features 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit bus—a configuration comparable to the 7900 GRE, sufficient for 1440p gaming for several years. 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.

Crucially, AMD isn't releasing a reference design for the RX 9070, a departure from previous generations. All versions will be manufactured by third-party board partners. My testing utilized the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC 16G, a triple-slot card with a factory overclock.

FSR 4

Since DLSS's emergence in 2018, AI upscaling has become a vital performance enhancer without significant image quality loss. Previously largely exclusive to Nvidia, FSR 4 now brings this capability to AMD GPUs.

FSR 4 leverages previous frames and in-game data through an AI model to upscale lower-resolution images to native resolution. This differs from FSR 3's temporal upscaling, which lacked an AI algorithm for detail refinement, leading to artifacts.

The AI processing in FSR 4 introduces a minor performance penalty compared to FSR 3. For instance, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 at 1440p on the Extreme preset showed a drop from 165 fps (FSR 3) to 159 fps (FSR 4). Similar results were observed in Monster Hunter Wilds.

Adrenalin software provides an FSR 4 toggle, allowing users to prioritize image quality (FSR 4) or performance (FSR 3).

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT & 9070 – Benchmarks

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Performance

At $549, the RX 9070 directly challenges the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, frequently surpassing it. At 1440p, it's approximately 12% faster than the RTX 5070 and 22% faster than the RX 7900 GRE.

Note that testing involved a factory-overclocked RX 9070 (Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC), with a reported boost clock of 2,700MHz (approximately 7% higher than base). This likely contributes to a 4-5% performance increase.

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

3DMark benchmarks (Speed Way and Steel Nomad) showed mixed results, with the RX 9070 slightly behind the RTX 5070 in ray-traced scenarios but significantly ahead in non-ray-traced tests.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 testing at 1440p with FSR 3 showed a 26% lead over the RTX 5070 and a 15% lead over the 7900 GRE. Cyberpunk 2077 (ray tracing enabled) showed a small but significant 3% advantage for the RX 9070. Metro Exodus (raw ray tracing performance) demonstrated an 11% lead. Red Dead Redemption 2 (Vulkan) showed a 23% advantage. Total War: Warhammer 3 results were close at 1440p, with a larger difference at 4K. Assassin's Creed Mirage showed an 18% lead. Black Myth Wukong results were essentially a tie. Forza Horizon 5 showed a 12% lead over the RTX 5070 and 25% over the 7900 GRE.

The RX 9070's performance advantage over the RTX 5070 at the same price point is notable. The 16GB VRAM also positions the RX 9070 favorably for future-proofing, despite slightly lower clock speeds than the RTX 5070's GDDR7. The combination of better performance and significantly more VRAM makes the RX 9070 a compelling choice.