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 challenges the underwhelming GeForce RTX 5070. In this matchup, AMD emerges victorious, making the RX 9070 a compelling choice for 1440p gaming. However, the story isn't quite that simple.
AMD's own Radeon RX 9070 XT presents a compelling alternative, costing only $50 more. While the performance difference—approximately 8%—justifies the price gap mathematically, the extra cost is hard to ignore for a noticeable performance boost. Nevertheless, the competitive landscape looks bright for Team Red with these two strong contenders.
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 card as close to this starting price as possible, given its proximity in price to the superior Radeon RX 9070 XT.
AMD Radeon RX 9070 – Photos
Specs and Features
Like its sibling, the RX 9070 XT, the RX 9070 utilizes the RDNA 4 architecture. This translates to significant performance gains, 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 featuring 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. These improvements to ray tracing and AI acceleration finally allow the card to compete effectively in ray-traced games. The enhanced AI Accelerators also enable FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 4, AMD's first foray into AI upscaling.
Similar to the 9070 XT, the RX 9070 pairs 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM with a 256-bit bus—a configuration mirroring the 7900 GRE, sufficient for 1440p gaming for years to come. While GDDR7 would have been a welcome addition, it likely would have increased the cost.
AMD recommends a 550W power supply, citing a 220W power budget. However, testing revealed a peak consumption of 249W. While not requiring enhanced cooling, a 600W PSU is recommended for safety.
Unlike previous generations, AMD isn't releasing a reference design for the RX 9070. All versions will be manufactured by third-party board partners. This review utilizes 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 crucial performance enhancer. Previously an Nvidia exclusive, FSR 4 brings this technology to AMD GPUs. It utilizes previous frames and in-game data, processed through an AI model, to upscale lower-resolution images to your native resolution. This differs from FSR 3's temporal upscaling, lacking the AI detail refinement, thus reducing artifacts.
The AI processing introduces a minor performance penalty compared to FSR 3. For example, in *Call of Duty: Black Ops 6* at 1440p with Extreme settings, FSR 3 yielded 165 fps, dropping to 159 fps with FSR 4. Similar results were observed in *Monster Hunter World*. The Adrenalin software allows toggling between FSR 3 and FSR 4, allowing users to prioritize image quality or performance.
AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT & 9070 – Benchmarks
Performance
Priced at $549, the RX 9070 directly competes with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, consistently outperforming it at 1440p. It also significantly outperforms the RX 7900 GRE (also launched at $549 in 2024) by 22%, a substantial improvement considering its 30% fewer cores. Note that this review utilized a factory-overclocked version, resulting in a potential 4-5% performance boost.
Testing utilized publicly available drivers (Nvidia Game Ready driver 572.60 and AMD Adrenalin 24.12.1, with review drivers for the RX 9070, 9070 XT, and RTX 5070). The RX 9070 demonstrated strong performance across various titles, often surpassing the RTX 5070, particularly in *Call of Duty: Black Ops 6*, *Cyberpunk 2077*, *Metro Exodus*, and *Red Dead Redemption 2*. While *Total War: Warhammer 3* showed a close competition at 1440p, *Assassin's Creed Mirage* and *Forza Horizon 5* again favored the RX 9070. *Black Myth Wukong* proved a closer race.
The RX 9070's superior performance, combined with its 16GB VRAM (compared to the RTX 5070), makes it a future-proof choice. Even with a hypothetical performance tie, the larger VRAM would make it the better value. The combination of better performance and more VRAM solidifies its position as the superior option.
Test System
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
Motherboard: Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero
RAM: 32GB G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo @ 6,000MHz
SSD: 4TB Samsung 990 Pro
CPU Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin III 360
