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 finds itself directly competing with the underwhelming GeForce RTX 5070. This competition is one AMD easily wins, making the RX 9070 a compelling choice for 1440p gaming.

However, the situation isn't quite so straightforward. AMD's own Radeon RX 9070 XT, only $50 more expensive, presents a difficult choice. While the 9070 is approximately 8% slower and 9% cheaper than its XT sibling—a mathematically sound difference—the extra performance for a relatively small price increase makes the 9070 XT a hard act to follow. Despite this internal competition, AMD still offers a strong contender in the mid-range GPU market.

Purchasing Guide

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 launches March 6th, with a starting price of $549. Expect variations in pricing from different manufacturers. Prioritize models closest to the MSRP given its proximity in price to the superior RX 9070 XT.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 – Photos

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Specs and Features

Sharing the RDNA 4 architecture with the RX 9070 XT, the RX 9070 boasts significant performance gains. It dramatically surpasses the previous generation Radeon RX 7900 GRE, despite possessing 30% fewer compute units.

The card features 56 Compute Units, each containing 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 improved Ray and AI Accelerators allow the 9070 to compete effectively in ray-traced games. The enhanced AI Accelerators enable FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 4, marking AMD's first foray into AI upscaling.

Like the 9070 XT, it utilizes 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit bus—a configuration similar to the 7900 GRE, sufficient for 1440p gaming for several years. While GDDR7 adoption would have been beneficial, it likely would have increased the cost.

AMD suggests a 550W power supply, with a 220W power budget. Testing revealed a peak consumption of 249W; a 600W PSU is recommended for safety.

Importantly, unlike previous generations, AMD isn't releasing a reference design for the RX 9070. All versions 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

Following the success of DLSS, AI upscaling has become crucial for performance enhancement without significant image quality loss. FSR 4 brings this technology to AMD GPUs for the first time.

FSR 4 utilizes previous frames and in-game data, processed through an AI model to upscale lower-resolution images to the native resolution. Unlike FSR 3's temporal upscaling, FSR 4's AI algorithm refines details, 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 (Extreme preset), FSR 3 yielded 165 fps, dropping to 159 fps with FSR 4. Similar results were observed in Monster Hunter World.

The Adrenalin software allows users to choose between FSR 3 (slightly better performance) and FSR 4 (better image quality), catering to individual preferences and game types.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT & 9070 – Benchmarks

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Performance

Priced competitively with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 consistently outperforms it at 1440p, achieving an average 12% performance lead. It also significantly surpasses the RX 7900 GRE (22% improvement) despite having 30% fewer cores.

Note that this review used a factory-overclocked RX 9070 (Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC), with a boost clock of 2,700MHz (approximately 7% overclock). This contributes to the performance advantage. All cards were tested using their respective current public drivers (Nvidia Game Ready driver 572.60, AMD Adrenalin 24.12.1, and review drivers for the RX 9070, RX 9070 XT, and RTX 5070).

3DMark benchmarks show a near tie with the RTX 5070 in ray-traced tests, but a significant 20% lead in non-ray-traced scenarios.

In game benchmarks, the RX 9070 demonstrates strong performance across various titles, often exceeding the RTX 5070 and RX 7900 GRE. Notable leads were observed in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Cyberpunk 2077, Metro Exodus, Red Dead Redemption 2, Assassin's Creed Mirage, and Forza Horizon 5. Performance was comparable in Black Myth Wukong and Total War: Warhammer 3.

The RX 9070's superior VRAM (16GB) compared to the RTX 5070 ensures better longevity, further enhancing its value proposition. The combination of better performance and larger VRAM makes the RX 9070 a compelling choice even if the performance difference were negligible.