Before I tested the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, I wondered just what else AMD could try. After all, we’ve seen good performance, competitive pricing and even gigantic cost reductions on legacy cards to improve their value, yet AMD still makes up a fraction of the discrete graphics card market according to the Steam Hardware Survey. What makes RDNA 4 any different?
There’s still going to be a mountain to climb in terms of mind share, but these new RDNA 4 graphics cards include two critical pieces of the puzzle: a viable alternative to DLSS in the form of FSR 4 and significantly improved ray tracing performance. Those improvements allow for some convincing results, helped further by – dare we say – refreshingly reasonable pricing, with the RX 9070 at £524/$549 and the 9070 XT at £569/$599.
Our testing shows the RX 9070 delivers around eight to ten percent more performance on aggregate than the RTX 5070 while occupying the same MSRP. Meanwhile, the RTX 5070 Ti beats the RX 9070 XT by five percent at 4K and three percent at 1440p, but the AMD card costs $150 less – making it the easier card to recommend overall of this Nvidia and AMD quartet.
The cards we’ve got in for testing are typical of the majority that will likely sell, being large, quiet and well-built cards with factory overclocks – and inflated prices to match. Unlike most cards though, these are Sapphire Pure versions in white, making them a nice choice for a white gaming PC if you’re into that aesthetic trend.
The 9070 XT we’re testing here has a sticker price of $679, an $80 premium, while the non-XT is $620 – a $70 premium over MSRP. Every modern Sapphire card I’ve ever had has been quiet and performant and I’ve no real qualms with either of these. Twin PCIe eight pin power inputs provide the juice, while video outputs consist of two DisplayPort 2.1A ports and two HDMI 2.1 ports.
In terms of specifications, the RX 9070 has 56 compute units up against the full complement of 64 within the XT model. A boost clock of 2.54GHz on the non-XT up against 2.97GHz on the XT shows quite a divide – but as you’ll see shortly, the gap on these Sapphire models is much tighter. Sapphire seems to have taken the non-XT’s boost clock up to 2.7GHz – which is not insignificant, while a small bump to just over 3.0GHz on the XT won’t have as much of an impact. The power differential is certainly wide though – 220W on the non-XT up against a curiously specific 304W on the new AMD flagship.
Both cards get 16GB of memory, serviced by a 256-bit memory interface. As a reminder, there’s no GDDR7 – and correspondingly luxurious memory bandwidth figures here like Nvidia’s 50-series cards, with AMD sticking with the better tried-and-tested GDDR6.
| AMD | RX 9070 XT | RX 9070 | RX 7900 GRE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stream Processors | 4096 | 3584 | 5120 |
| Compute Units | 64 | 56 | 80 |
| Boost clock | 2.97GHz* | 2.54GHz* | 2.25GHz |
| Game clock | 2.40GHz | 2.07GHz | 1.88GHz |
| ROPS | 128 | 128 | 160 |
| Memory | 16 GB GDDR6 | 16 GB GDDR6 | 16 GB GDDR6 |
| Memory bus width | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory bandwidth | 640GB/s | 640GB/s | 576GB/s |
| Total Graphics Power | 304W* | 220W* | 260W |
| PSU recommendation | 750W | 650W | 600W |
| Power connector | 2 or 3x 8-pin | 2 or 3x 8-pin | 2x 8-pin |
| Price | $599 | $549 | $549 |
| Release Date | March 6th 2025 | March 6th 2025 | July 27th 2023 |
*The Sapphire 9070 XT and 9070 cards we’re looking at are clocked higher than reference, at 3.01GHz and 2.70GHz respectively. That also increases TDP nominally, at 317W and 245W respectively.
Taking a quick look at power usage, it’s clear that AMD’s cards do pull more power than their respective Nvidia rivals. In Black Myth Wukong, for example, the 9070 XT is at 91 percent of the RTX 5070 Ti’s frame-rate, but requires 33 percent more power, working out to 6.3 joules per frame versus Nvidia’s 4.3 joules per frame. On the vanilla 9070, power drops significantly, but the card still draws 13 percent more power while delivering a nigh-equivalent result, working out to 5.4 joules per frame on the 9070 and 4.8 joules per frame on the 5070 – advantage Nvidia.
In other games, the story can be a bit different. Hitman sans RT tends to favour AMD architectures, and here the 9070 XT beats the 5070 Ti by five percent while drawing 16 percent more power – 2.0 joules per frame versus 1.8 joules per frame on Nvidia. The non-XT card is more efficient once again, beating the vanilla 5070 by 21 percent while requiring just 2.6 percent more power.
The video review provides a couple more examples of how efficiency varies on a per-game basis, but the short of it is that the XT is pushed harder than the non-XT, making the former more less efficient than the latter in the attempt to make up ground against its Nvidia counterpart.
Alongside each graphics card, we’re using a top-end system based around the fastest gaming CPU, the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, to shift the burden to the graphics card as much as possible. We also have 32GB of Corsair DDR5-6000 CL30 memory, a high-end Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard and a 1000W Corsair PSU. With all that said, let’s get into the benchmarks proper.
AMD Radeon RX 7090 / 7090 XT Analysis
- Introduction [This Page]
- RT benchmarks: Alan Wake 2, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Cyberpunk 2077
- RT benchmarks: Dying Light 2, F1 24, Hitman: World of Assassination
- RT benchmarks: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, A Plague Tale: Requiem
- Game benchmarks: Alan Wake 2, Black Myth: Wukong, Cyberpunk 2077
- Game benchmarks: F1 24, Forza Horizon 5, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2
- Game benchmarks: Hitman: World of Assassination, A Plague Tale: Requiem
- Conclusions, value and recommendations
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