AMD Radeon RX 9070 Review

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. In this matchup, AMD emerges victorious, 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 price difference reflects the 9070's approximately 8% lower performance, the extra $50 buys a noticeable performance boost, making the decision less clear-cut. Nevertheless, AMD offers a strong contender in this segment.

Purchasing Guide

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 launches March 6th, with a starting price of $549. Expect variations in pricing across different models. Given its proximity in price to the RX 9070 XT, prioritizing a model closest to the $549 MSRP is advisable.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 – Photos

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Specs and Features

Like the RX 9070 XT, the RX 9070 utilizes the RDNA 4 architecture. This results in significant performance gains, surpassing 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 (56 and 112 respectively). These improvements, particularly to ray tracing and AI acceleration, allow the card to compete effectively in ray-traced games. The enhanced AI Accelerators enable FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 4, AMD's first foray into AI upscaling.

Similar to the 9070 XT, it features 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit bus—a configuration comparable to the 7900 GRE, sufficient for 1440p gaming for years to come. While GDDR7 would have been beneficial, it likely would have increased the cost.

AMD suggests a 550W power supply, with a 220W power budget. Testing revealed peak consumption at 249W. While not requiring drastically improved cooling, a 600W PSU is recommended for safety.

Crucially, unlike previous generations, AMD isn't releasing a reference design for the RX 9070. All versions will be from third-party manufacturers. The reviewed model was the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC 16G, a triple-slot card with a factory overclock.

FSR 4

Since DLSS's emergence, AI upscaling has become a key performance enhancer. FSR 4 brings this technology to AMD GPUs for the first time. Utilizing previous frames and in-game data, an AI model upscales lower-resolution images to the native resolution. This differs from FSR 3's temporal upscaling, resulting in improved image quality with minimal artifacts.

However, the AI processing introduces a slight performance penalty compared to FSR 3. Testing showed a minor frame rate drop when switching from FSR 3 to FSR 4 in various games. The Adrenalin software allows users to choose between FSR 3 (better performance) and FSR 4 (better 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 in benchmarks. At 1440p, it's on average 12% faster and significantly outpaces the RX 7900 GRE (22% lead). This is impressive, considering the 30% reduction in cores.

Note that the tested model was a factory-overclocked version (approximately 7% boost clock), influencing performance. All cards were tested using their respective latest public drivers at the time of writing.

3DMark benchmarks showed the RX 9070 either matching or exceeding the RTX 5070, depending on the test's ray tracing implementation.

Game benchmarks across titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Cyberpunk 2077, Metro Exodus, Red Dead Redemption 2, Total War: Warhammer 3, Assassin's Creed Mirage, Black Myth Wukong, and Forza Horizon 5 consistently demonstrated the RX 9070's superior performance, often exceeding the RTX 5070 by a significant margin (in some cases, over 20%).

The RX 9070's advantage is further solidified by its 16GB VRAM, offering better future-proofing than the RTX 5070's GDDR7. Even with a hypothetical performance tie, the larger VRAM capacity would make the RX 9070 the more valuable option. Combined with its superior performance, the Radeon RX 9070 presents a compelling choice for gamers.