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, AMD's internal competition presents a slight complication. The RX 9070 is only $50 cheaper than the superior RX 9070 XT. While the price difference aligns with the 9070's roughly 8% lower performance, the extra $50 for significantly better performance is hard to ignore. Nevertheless, Team Red presents a strong showing in this internal competition.

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 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 RDNA 4 architecture. This results in substantial performance gains, significantly outperforming the previous generation Radeon RX 7900 GRE despite having 30% fewer compute units.

The RX 9070 boasts 56 Compute Units, each with 64 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), totaling 3,584 shaders. Each compute unit includes one Ray Accelerator and two AI Accelerators (56 and 112 total, 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 AI upscaling technology.

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 would have been beneficial, it likely would have increased the price.

AMD recommends a 550W power supply; however, testing showed peak consumption at 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 utilized 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 finally brings this capability to AMD GPUs. 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, which lacked the AI detail refinement, leading to artifacts.

FSR 4 introduces a slight performance penalty compared to FSR 3 due to the AI processing. However, the Adrenalin software allows users to choose between FSR 3 (slightly 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. At 1440p, it's on average 12% faster than the RTX 5070 and 22% faster than the RX 7900 GRE. This is 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 boost clock of 2700MHz (approximately a 7% overclock). This contributes to the performance gains. Testing utilized 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).

The RX 9070 excels in 3DMark benchmarks, particularly in Steel Nomad (20% faster than the RTX 5070). In gaming benchmarks, it consistently outperforms the RTX 5070 in titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Cyberpunk 2077, Metro Exodus, and Red Dead Redemption 2. Performance is more comparable in Total War: Warhammer 3 and Black Myth Wukong. Assassin's Creed Mirage and Forza Horizon 5 also show significant performance advantages for the RX 9070.

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

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