AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT review: RDNA 4 fixes a lot of AMD’s problems

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The 9070 series’ $549 and $599.99 prices are priced to match Nvidia’s $549 RTX-5070 and undercut its $749 RTX-5070 Ti. We’ll compare the 9070 series with these cards and the top tier GPUs of the RX 7000 series.

Starting at the top with rasterized benchmarks with no ray-tracing effects, the 9070 XT does a good job of standing up to Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti, coming within a few frames per second of its performance in all the games we tested (and scoring very similarly in the 3DMark Time Spy Extreme benchmark).

Both cards are considerably faster than the RTX 5070—between 15 and 28 percent for the 9070 XT and between 5 and 13 percent for the regular 9070 (our 5070 scored weirdly low in Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered so we’d treat those numbers as outliers for now). Both 9070 cards also stack up well next to the RX 7000 series here—the 9070 can usually just about match the performance of the 7900 XT, and the 9070 XT usually beats it by a little. Both cards thoroughly outrun the old RX 7900 GRE, which was AMD’s $549 GPU offering just a year ago.

The 7900 XT does have 20GB of RAM instead of 16GB, which might help its performance in some edge cases. But 16GB is still perfectly generous for a 1440p-to-4K graphics card—the 5070 only offers 12GB, which could end up limiting its performance in some games as RAM requirements continue to rise.

On ray-tracing improvements

Nvidia got a jump on AMD when it introduced hardware-accelerated ray-tracing in the RTX 20-series in 2018. And while these effects were only supported in a few games at the time, many modern games offer at least some kind of ray-traced lighting effects.

AMD caught up a little when it began shipping its own ray-tracing support in the RDNA2 architecture in late 2020, but the issue since then has always been that AMD cards have taken a larger performance hit than GeForce GPUs when these effects are turned on. RDNA3 promised improvements, but our tests still generally showed the same deficit as before.

So we’re looking for two things with RDNA4’s ray-tracing performance. First, we want the numbers to be higher than they were for comparably priced RX 7000-series GPUs, the same thing we look for in non-ray-traced (or rasterized) rendering performance. Second, we want the size of the performance hit to go down. To pick an example: the RX 7900 GRE could compete with Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti Super in games without ray tracing, but it was closer to a non-Super RTX 4070 in ray-traced games. It has helped keep AMD’s cards from being across-the-board competitive with Nvidia’s—is that any different now?

The picture our tests paint is mixed but tentatively positive. The 9070 series and RDNA4 post solid improvements in the Cyberpunk 2077benchmarks, substantially closing the performance gap with Nvidia. In games where AMD’s cards performed well enough before—here represented by Returnal—performance goes up, but roughly proportionately with rasterized performance. And both 9070 cards st ill punch below their weight inBlack Myth: Wukongfalling substantially behind the 5070 under the punishing Cinematic graphics preset.

So the benefits you see, as with any GPU update, will depend a bit on the game you’re playing. There’s also a possibility that game optimizations and driver updates made with RDNA4 in mind could boost performance further. We can’t say that AMD has caught all the way up to Nvidia here—the 9070 and 9070 XT are both closer to the GeForce RTX 5070 than the 5070 Ti, despite keeping it closer to the 5070 Ti in rasterized tests—but thereisreal, measurable improvement here, which is what we were looking for.

Power usage

The 9070 series’ performance increases are particularly impressive when you look at the power-consumption numbers. The 9070 comes close to the 7900 XT’s performance but uses 90 W less power under load. It beats the RTX 5070 most of the time but uses around 30 W less power.

The 9070 XT is a little less impressive on this front—AMD has set clock speeds pretty high, and this can increase power use disproportionately. The 9070 XT is usually 10 or 15 percent faster than the 9070 but uses 38 percent more power. The XT’s power consumption is similar to the RTX 5070 Ti’s (a GPU it often matches) and the 7900 XT’s (a GPU it always beats), so it’s not too egregious, but it’s not as standout as the 9070’s.

AMD gives 9070 owners a couple of new toggles for power limits, though, which we’ll talk about in the next section.

Experimenting with “Total Board Power”

We don’t normally dabble much with overclocking when we review CPUs or GPUs—we’re happy to leave that to folks at other outlets. But when we review CPUs, we do usually test them with multiple power limits in place. Playing with power limits is easier (and occasionally safer) than actually overclocking, and it often comes with large gains to either performance (a chip that performs much better when given more power to work with) or efficiency (a chip that can run at nearly full speed without using as much power).

Initially, I experimented with the RX 9070’s power limits by accident. AMD sent me one version of the 9070 but exchanged it because of a minor problem the OEM identified with some units early in the production run. I had, of course, already run most of our tests on it, but that’s the way these things go sometimes.

The replacement RX 9070 card, an ASRock Steel Legend model, was performing significantly better in our tests, sometimes nearly closing the gap between the 9070 and the XT. It wasn’t until I tested power consumption that I discovered the explanation—by default, it was using a 245 W power limit rather than the AMD-defined 220 W limit. Usually, these kinds of factory tweaks don’t make much of a difference, but for the 9070, this power bump gave it a nice performance boost while still keeping it close to the 250 W power limit of the GeForce RTX 5070.

The 90-series cards we tested both add some power presets to AMD’s Adrenalin app in the Performance tab under Tuning. These replace and/or complement some of the automated overclocking and undervolting buttons that exist here for older Radeon cards. Clicking Favor Efficiency or Favor Performance can ratchet the card’s Total Board Power (TBP) up or down, limiting performance so that the card runs cooler and quieter or allowing the card to consume more power so it can run a bit faster.

For this particular ASRock 9070 card, the default TBP is set to 245 W. Selecting “Favor Efficiency” sets it to the default 220 W. You can double-check these values using an app like HWInfodisplays both the current and maximum TBP on its Sensors Status window. The Custom button in Adrenalin gives you access a Power Tuning slide, which on our card allowed us ratchet up the TBP by up to 10% or down by up to 30%.

I’d assume that bumping up the power limit is common among GPU overclockers, regardless of who makes the card. AMD acknowledges that some of its partners may ship 9070XT models with a power limit of 340W out of the package, but AMD also says that “you start seeing diminishing returns as you approach the top of that [power efficiency] curve.”

The driver has a second automated power setting that you can use to find the best balance between performance and power efficiency.

A quick look at FSR4 performance

One of AMD’s headlining improvements to the RX 90-series is the introduction of FSR 4, a new version of its FidelityFX Super Resolution upscaling algorithm. Like Nvidia’s DLSS and Intel’s XeSS, FSR 4 can take advantage of RDNA 4’s machine learning processing power to do hardware-backed upscaling instead of taking a hardware-agnostic approach as the older FSR versions did. AMD says this will improve upscaling quality, but it also means FSR4 will only work on RDNA 4 GPUs.

The good news is that FSR 3.1 and FSR 4 are forward- and backward-compatible. Games that have already added FSR 3.1 support can automatically take advantage of FSR 4, and games that support FSR 4 on the 90-series can just run FSR 3.1 on older and non-AMD GPUs.

The only game in our current test suite to be compatible with FSR 4 is Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered and we tested its performance using both FSR 3.1 and FSR 4. In general, we found that FSR 4 improved visual quality at the cost of just a few frames per second when run at the same settings—not unlike using Nvidia’s recently released “transformer model” for DLSS upscaling.

Many games will let you choose which version of FSR you want to use. But for FSR 3.1 games that don’t have a built-in FSR 4 option, there’s a toggle in AMD’s Adrenalin driver you can hit to switch to the better upscaling algorithm.

Even if they come with a performance hit, new upscaling algorithmscanstill improve performance by making the lower-resolution presets look better. We run all of our testing in “Quality” mode, which generally renders at two-thirds of native resolution and scales up. But if FSR 4 runni ng in Balanced or Performance mode looks the same to your eyes as FSR 3.1 running in Quality mode, you can still end up with a net performance improvement in the end.

RX 9070 or 9070 XT?

Just $50 separates the advertised price of the 9070 from that of the 9070 XT, something both Nvidia and AMD have done in the past that I find a bit annoying. If you have $549 to spend on a graphics card, you can almost certainly scrape together $599 for a graphics card. All else being equal, I’d tell most people trying to choose one of these to just spring for the 9070 XT.

That said, availability and retail pricing for these might be all over the place. If your choices are a regular RX 9070 or nothing, or an RX 9070 at $549 and an RX 9070 XT at any price higher than $599, I would just grab a 9070 and not sweat it too much. The two cards aren’t that far apart in performance, especially if you bump the 9070’s TBP up a little bit, and games that are playable on one will be playable at similar settings on the other.

Pretty close to great

We’ve got plenty of objective data in here, so I don’t mind saying that I came into this review kind ofwanting to like the 9070 and 9070 XT. Nvidia’s 50-series cards have mostly upheld the status quo, and for the last couple of years, the status quo has been sustained high prices and very modest generational upgrades. And who doesn’t like an underdog story?

I think our test results mostly justify my priors. The RX 9070 and 9070 XT are very competitive graphics cards, helped along by a particularly mediocre RTX 5070 refresh from Nvidia. In non-ray-traced games, both cards wipe the floor with the 5070 and come close to competing with the $749 RTX 5070 Ti. In games and synthetic benchmarks with ray-tracing effects on, both cards can usually match or slightly beat the similarly priced 5070, partially (if not entirely) addressing AMD’s longstanding performance deficit here. Neither card comes close to the 5070 Ti in these games, but they’re also not priced like a 5070 Ti.