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Announcing the upcoming Radeon RX9070 series, along with AMD’s comments and statements, confirms that these graphics cards are aimed squarely at the midrange market. As we wait for final specifications and pricing to be announced, new rumors indicate that Team Red is ready to aggressively undercut Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 50 offerings.
IT Home reports that AMD is aiming to set the benchmark for graphics cards. Highly competitive prices are expected for the upcoming Radeon RX9070 and 9070XT. This could accelerate the retirement of RX 7800XT. Depending on benchmarks, a price of less than $600 could be a serious competitor to Nvidia’s upcoming RTX5070 and 5070T.
AMD’s current best GPU in this range is the Radeon RX7800 XT which launched in 2023 for $499. Reports indicate the company originally planned to stop production in the third-quarter of this year, but may have decided that January was a better time to focus on the RX 9000 Series.
The Radeon RX 9070 XT is expected to be based on the Navi 48 GPU, rumored to feature 4,096 cores, a 2.97GHz boost clock, 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM with a 256-bit bus, and 640GB/s of memory bandwidth. The standard RX 9070 is also anticipated to include 16GB of VRAM.
Reports suggest that the RX 9070 XT could debut at a $599 MSRP, undercutting Nvidia’s $749 RTX 5070 Ti by $150. If these rumors hold, the RX 9070 will likely be slightly cheaper than the $549 RTX 5070.
However, AMD’s competitiveness will entirely depend on real-world performance results, and those are currently only available in vague snapshots. IGN reported impressive rasterization performance from the RX 9070 in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, while Hardware Unboxed highlighted substantial improvements in upscaling image quality.
It will take extensive testing to determine if the RTX series’ transition to GDDR7 – which offers increased memory speed and bandwidth – will offer a meaningful edge over Radeon’s GDDR6. AMD’s claims about dramatic improvements in ray tracing are also unsubstantiated.
AMD’s GPUs historically have lagged behind Nvidia in hardware-accelerated Ray tracing. Many recent titles, such as God of War Ragnarok and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, run without it. Ray tracing-based games are becoming more common, such as Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, Star Wars Outlaws and Assassin’s creed Shadows.
Nvidia will launch the AMD confirmed that it will release the RX9070 series in early march. RTX 5070 Ti, 5060, and 5060 are also expected to be released soon.
