AMD has finally unveiled its much-anticipated new flagship graphics cards, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and AMD Radeon RX 9070. Based on a new AMD RDNA 4 graphics architecture, they include much-improved ray tracing performance and arrive alongside FSR 4, a new version of the company’s upscaling tech. As long rumored, though, they won’t have the power to compete with the RTX 5090 but are instead pitched at competing with Nvidia’s upcoming mid-range RTX 5000 GPUs.
Unveiled during its press conference at the CES 2025 trade show, AMD‘s new best graphics card contenders were also shown alongside a tease for its upcoming RX 9060 GPUs that will be coming later to compete for the budget end of the GPU market.
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is the top-tier card that AMD’s announcing today and while the reveal confirms several details from previous AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT leaks, many details of the new card and its GPU have yet to be released. As such, we still don’t have confirmation that the card will use the rumored Navi 48 GPU or exactly how many compute units the GPU contains.
What we do know, though, is that the new card will use the company’s new RDNA 4 architecture, which the company claims has been “built from the ground up […] for performance and immersion with a significant boost in AI.” To this end, the company has overhauled the 2nd-gen AI accelerators on the GPU, adding “plenty of capabilities to drive more AI experiences,” though AMD hasn’t provided any stats to back up these claims.
The company has also confirmed it has significantly improved this architecture’s ray tracing ability, though again gives no specific numbers. Previous leaks have pointed to the ray tracing power of this card being a rival to that of the RTX 4080, which would make for a significant step up from the company’s RDNA 3 architecture, but leaves the door open for Nvidia to once again take the lead on this front with its new RTX 5000 series cards.
AMD also claims the new architecture has optimized compute units along with increases to clock speed and instructions per clock compared to its previous architecture. It has also confirmed that the new cards will be built on a 4nm process.
The company confirmed that cards would be manufactured by a host of add-in board (AIB) partners, such as Acer, Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte, Powercolor, Sapphire, and Yeston, and its images suggest the company will also release its own versions of the cards, as they did with the RX 7900 XTX, for instance. You can see AMD’s cards in the center and center-right of the above image.
One detail that AMD did discuss is the new naming scheme for these cards. Along with skipping past RX 8000 and straight onto RX 9000 – to align with its CPU number scheme – AMD is switching two of the digits of its model numbers around compared to previous generation cards, so instead of the RX 7700 XT, for instance, the new card will be the RX 9070 XT. Were AMD to have an equivalent of the RX 7900 XTX in this generation, it would be called something like the RX 9090 XTX in this new scheme.
Interestingly, AMD verified that this digit switch was to make for easier direct comparison to Nvidia’s competing cards. So, yes, the RX 9070 XT should line up in terms of performance with the RTX 5070.
Meanwhile, while talking about its new naming scheme, AMD also revealed that the second tier range of cards in the 9000 series will be the RX 9060, with these cards set to compete with upcoming Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 cards.
Slightly disappointingly, AMD is targeting a broad Q1 2025 AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT release date, which could mean these cards won’t arrive as soon as some previous rumors suggested. We also won’t hear more about the details of the cards until “later in the quarter.” That said, AMD does mention that it will be previewing its new GPUs at CES 2025, and we’re hoping to soon see them in action on the show floor.