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. 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 price difference aligns with the 9070's approximately 8% lower performance, the extra $50 buys a noticeable performance upgrade, making the decision difficult. Nevertheless, AMD's offerings present a strong showing for Team Red.

Purchasing Guide

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 launches March 6th, starting at $549. Expect variations in pricing from different manufacturers. Prioritize models closest to the starting price, given its proximity in cost to the superior 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 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 (56 and 112 respectively). These enhancements, particularly to ray tracing and AI acceleration, allow the card to compete effectively in ray-traced games. The improved 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 adoption would have been beneficial, it likely would have increased the price.

AMD recommends a 550W power supply; however, testing revealed peak power consumption of 249W (slightly exceeding the 220W budget). A 600W PSU is recommended for safety.

Crucially, unlike previous generations, AMD isn't releasing a reference design. All RX 9070 cards will be from third-party manufacturers. This review uses 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. It utilizes previous frames and in-game data via an AI model to upscale lower-resolution images to the native resolution. This differs from FSR 3's temporal upscaling, offering improved detail and reducing artifacts.

The AI processing introduces a slight performance penalty compared to FSR 3. For example, in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 at 1440p (Extreme preset), FSR 3 yielded 165 fps, dropping to 159 fps with FSR 4. Similar results were observed in Monster Hunter Wilds. 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 on average 12% faster and 22% faster than the RX 7900 GRE. This is a significant improvement, especially considering the 30% reduction in cores.

Note: The review unit was a factory-overclocked version (Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC), boasting a 2700MHz boost clock (approximately a 7% increase). This contributes to the performance gains.

Testing utilized current public 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).

3DMark benchmarks (Speed Way and Steel Nomad) showed the RX 9070 either matching or significantly exceeding the RTX 5070's performance.

In game benchmarks (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), the RX 9070 frequently demonstrated a substantial performance advantage over the RTX 5070 and RX 7900 GRE, particularly at 1440p. Results varied depending on the game engine's optimization for AMD or Nvidia hardware.

Conclusion

The Radeon RX 9070's strong performance against the RTX 5070 at the same price point is impressive. Its 16GB VRAM provides better future-proofing, even if slightly slower than GDDR7. The combination of superior performance and larger VRAM makes the RX 9070 a compelling choice.

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