this new GPU blows the RTX 5070 out of the water

Breathe out, untense your muscles, and relax, because after years of being lost in the wilderness AMD has finally come up with a decent GPU for an amazing price. I don’t have to reach for obscure use cases to suggest scenarios where the new AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is actually worth buying, because this time AMD has genuinely come up with the goods, with a graphics card that largely beats Nvidia at its own game.

It might not have an equivalent of Nvidia’s latest multi frame gen tech at its disposal, but this new GPU sees AMD catching up with Nvidia in several key areas. For a start, ray tracing is no longer an issue, with the Radeon RX 9070 XT even out-performing the RTX 5070 in a number of our ray-traced benchmarks, and it can do path tracing too. Secondly, AMD’s new FSR 4 tech is an absolute game changer when it comes to upscaling, with a massive improvement in image quality over FSR 3.

I’ve tested the Radeon RX 9070 XT in several games, testing frame gen, upscaling, ray tracing and standard rasterization, and it all adds up to a firm new entry on our guide to the best graphics card. It’s not all perfect, as I’ll explain over this review of the ASRock Taichi OC version of this card, but this is AMD’s strongest GPU for over a decade by far.

Specs

The Radeon RX 9070 XT is the current best showcase for AMD’s new RDNA 4 architecture, with it using a maxed-out Navi 48 GPU. It contains 64 of AMD’s new compute units, which are now built on a 4nm process. AMD says it has designed its new compute unit be more efficient than the previous design, and also to hit higher clock speeds. Indeed, the maximum boost clock of 2.97GHz is substantially higher than even the 2.5GHz of the top-end Radeon RX 7900 XTX from the last generation.

What’s more, there’s room to push the clock speed further, as shown by our ASRock Taichi model’s maximum boost clock of 3.1GHz. AMD specifies a 2.4GHz game clock as the frequency most likely to be hit during gaming, but this is quite conservative – our overclocked sample was regularly going over 3GHz during game testing.

The new GPU architecture also sees AMD moving to a new approach to ray tracing, with a new core design that the company says doubles the throughput of ray tracing calculations compared to the RDNA 3 design. Each compute unit contains one of these new RT cores, so you get 64 in the 9070 XT. AMD is also confident that the new RT core is up to the job of path tracing, which was beyond the scope of its last-gen GPUs in our tests.

AMD has also made big strides with its AI core design with RDNA 4, which the company says can handle neural rendering features such as neural radiance cache, and which is now used to power AMD’s FSR 4 resolution upscaling tech.

Unlike the RTX 5070, the 9070 XT also comes with 16GB of VRAM. It’s not as fast as the GDDR7 memory used in the GeForce RTX 5070, but it’s cheaper and available in larger supply. As you’ll see from our tests later, there’s also a good argument to be made for prioritizing capacity over performance when it comes to memory in this price bracket.

There’s a big number at the end of the specs list, though, which is the 304W power draw, and this figure will climb higher on overclocked cards as well. ASRock has even fitted its Taichi 9070 XT with a 16-pin power connector, despite all the problems with cables melting on Nvidia GPUs (though only on cards that draw considerably more power than this card). On the plus side, this does look much neater than three 8-pin power sockets when it comes to cabling, but you’ll want to make sure the plug is firmly connected to the socket before you switch on your PC.

Unlike the svelte RTX 5070 cards – especially the Founders Edition – our ASRock sample is also a hefty beast, taking up three slots with a massive cooler that sports three fans. This appears to be fairly typical of other RX 9070 XT card designs too.

FSR 4

As I mentioned earlier, one of the big new technologies AMD is launching with its new GPUs is FSR 4, its new upscaling tech that sees AMD FSR using machine learning with AI cores for the first time. It requires one of the new Radeon RX 9000-series GPUs to run, but it looks massively better than FSR 3.

That’s a low bar, of course, as FSR has looked pretty terrible up until now compared to Nvidia DLSS, especially now that the latter has moved to the new transformer model that looks even better than before. I’m very pleased to say that FSR 4 looks absolutely fantastic, though. I tried it out in both Call of Duty Black Ops 6 and Marvel Rivals for this review, and it’s a night and day difference when it comes to image quality.

Take a look at the comparative screenshots from Marvel Rivals below and you can see the difference up close. All these screenshots were taken with the in-game resolution set to 1080p with Ultra settings, and using the Performance preset for each upscaling tech.

The native res screenshot has no anti-aliasing at all, which is why the lines are so jagged, but look at the wires in the FSR 3 screenshot compared to FSR 4 – they’re much sharper, and much less blurry. There’s also much less digital noise around the lines on FSR 4 than FSR 3. If you look at the circle patterns on the lanterns, you’ll also see that they’re sharper and more clearly defined on FSR 4 than FSR 3.

In terms of performance, there’s a slight hit from using FSR 4 compared to FSR 3 using like-for-like settings, but the former looks so much better, to the point where FSR 4 on the Performance setting still looks more stable and less blurry than FSR 3 on the Quality setting, so you may as well use it.

At the time of writing, FSR 4 has to be enabled via the AMD Radeon settings app in Marvel Rivals, and it then replaces FSR 3 as the standard model in the game. AMD has specifically made the FSR 4 API a drop-in replacement for any games that already use FSR 3.1, meaning it’s easy for developers to implement the new tech, and you can even enable it yourself in some games.

This was the same in Call of Duty Black Ops 6, although in this case once it was enabled in the AMD Radeon settings, FSR 4 then also appeared as a separate option in the game menus, so you can choose between both FSR 3 and FSR 4. Again, the game looks great with FSR 4 enabled, even using the Performance setting, and it provides a decent step up in frame rates as well.

However, you currently need to disable variable shading (VRS) in the graphics settings to get the most out of FSR 4 in this game. With VRS enabled, we found that FSR 4 on the Quality setting was actually slower than using the native resolution.

Bear in mind that all these tests were run in the undemanding Tutorial for the game, as it’s easily repeatable when it comes to getting consistent results. They show you the difference in performance between each FSR setting, but actual frame rates in the game will be slower than these figures.

How we test

To assess the performance of the Radeon RX 9070 XT, I’m running a number of benchmarks using real games, rather than synthetic benchmarks. Each test is run three times, recorded with Nvidia FrameView, and I report the mean average of the results, discarding any obvious anomalies. I report two figures for frame rates – firstly, the average, which gives you an idea of the general frame rate you will achieve. Secondly, I report the 1% low, which is an average of the lowest one percent of results recorded during the benchmark.

The latter is a more reliable indicator of performance than the minimum, as it removes outliers, such as moments where a Windows system event that is unrelated to the performance of the GPU causes the game to stutter. In other words, the 1% low is what you can expect the actual minimum frame rate to be in these games.

We’ve tested our ASRock Taichi sample at its default overclocked settings. As such, bear in mind that a stock speed card will be a little slower than the results listed below, probably with around a 2-3fps performance difference.

To make a comparison, I also ran our F1 24 test with the card underclocked to the standard 2.97GHz speed, and the frame rate dropped by 2fps at 1440p. This ASRock card will be a little faster than stock speed, but not by a huge margin.

GPU test system specs:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
• CPU cooler: Corsair H100X RGB Elite
• Memory: 32GB 6,000MHz G.Skill TridentZ RGB, CL28
• Motherboard: MSI MAG X870E Carbon WiFi
• SSD: 2TB WD Black SN850X
• PSU: Corsair RM1000X Shift

Benchmarks

Call of Duty Black Ops 6

I always like to kick off the benchmarks section with a game that best shows off the power of a GPU, and in this case that’s Call of Duty Black Ops 6. AMD hasn’t just improved ray tracing power with RDNA 4, but it’s clearly also made big strides when it comes to rasterization performance, and the 9070 XT really shines here. Not only does the 9070 XT stomp all over the RTX 5070 and all the last-gen AMD GPUs in this game, but it even beats the RTX 5080 (yes, really).

That’s remarkable when you consider that the latter costs $999, and realistically costs much more than this figure as there’s so little stock. At 2,560 x 1,440, the Radeon RX 9070 XT averages 162fps in this game using the Extreme graphics preset, and that’s without any help from FSR as well. Comparatively, the RTX 5080 averages 142fps and the 5070 only averages 97fps. The 9070 XT has some amazing raw shader power at its disposal for the price.

The game is even smoothly playable at 4K, where the 9070 XT’s 99fps average with a 78fps 1% low is a fantastic result, especially compared to the respective 65fps and 48fps from the RTX 5070. I also benchmarked this game at 4K with both FSR frame gen and FSR 4 on the quality preset, where the 9070 XT averaged 157fps, a good 29fps in front of the RTX 5080, while the 5070 could only average 89fps. Thanks to FSR 4, the game also looks really good at these settings, unlike with FSR 3.

F1 24

But what about ray tracing, you say? Well, take a look at the F1 24 results at the Ultra High graphics preset, which enables ray tracing as standard. Again, even without FSR enabled, the 9070 XT’s 121fps average at 1440p is a superb result, being only 12fps behind the RTX 5080 and 20fps ahead of the RTX 4080 Super. The RTX 5070’s average of 89fps looks positively weedy in comparison.

You can even run this game at 4K with these settings on the 9070 XT, which averages 73fps with a 60fps 1% low, compared with 53fps and 41fps respectively on the RTX 5070. Again, the 9070 XT is even faster than the RTX 4080 Super in this test, as well as all the last-gen AMD GPUs, including the Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

FSR frame gen also works really well in this game if you’re starting from a frame rate of at least 60fps. At 4K with FSR on the quality setting and frame gen enabled, the 9070 XT even beats the RTX 4090, as well as the RTX 5080, averaging a massive 202fps with a 1% low of 110fps.

There’s a caveat here, though, which is that while the above result is great in terms of frame rates, this game doesn’t yet support FSR 4, and FSR upscaling looks significantly worse than DLSS in this game, with blurriness and horrible noise surrounding the edges of the moving tyres, for example. Even so, you can get a decent frame rate out of the 9070 XT at 1440p without using FSR at all.

Cyberpunk 2077

How about a really demanding ray tracing test, then? AMD’s GPUs have historically struggled with the ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077, which is incredibly demanding, especially if you enable the new Overdrive mode with path tracing. AMD has played a massive game of catch up here, though, as you can see in the results below.

I’ll start with a test that shows the basic raw ray tracing power of the GPU without any help from FSR upscaling and frame generation. At 1080p with the Ultra ray tracing preset, the Radeon RX 9070 XT averages 86fps, placing it between the RTX 4070 Ti and 4080, and a good 13fps ahead of the RTX 5070. With a 72fps 1% low you could even play the game at these settings without needing to enable FSR. It might be a first person shooter, but it’s much more about spectacle than a twitchy competitive first person shooter where high frame rates are crucial.

Move up to 1440p, and the Radeon RX 9070 XT averages 53fps in this test, with a 45fps 1% low, which is borderline playable, but we wouldn’t recommend playing the game at these settings. Even here, though, the 9070 XT is still happily sitting between the RTX 4070 Ti and 4080, while resting well above the RTX 5070’s 45fps average.

But what about path tracing? Can AMD really do it now? To find out, I enabled the Overdrive setting in the game, and also enlisted some help from FSR on the quality setting with frame gen enabled. As you can see in the results below at 1080p, the Radeon RX 9070 XT is again happily sitting between the RTX 4070 Ti and 4080. As with F1 24, the caveat here is that there’s no FSR 4 support for Cyberpunk 2077 yet, so the game looks worse on this GPU than on the Nvidia cards, but AMD can clearly do path tracing now.

The elephant in the room here, of course, is the absolutely massive result from the RTX 5070 here, thanks to its support for Nvidia’s multi frame gen tech with DLSS 4. With an average of 235fps, this game is really smooth on the RTX 5070 at these settings, making it a better choice than the 9070 XT. The latter can do it, though, and it’s a good 35fps than the Radeon RX 7900 XTX in this test, showing just how far AMD has come with its ray tracing tech.

Move up to 1440p, and the 9070 XT is still running reasonably well at a 92fps average. I say reasonably well, because it has to use frame gen to get there, but I found that the game is still playable at these settings, and it looks fantastic too. Again, though, the RTX 5070’s support for multi frame gen makes it a better choice in this scenario.

Finally, at 4K, the 9070 XT’s average of 45fps is unplayable, with its use of frame gen making for horrible input lag and stuttering. However, don’t be fooled by the RTX 5070’s 80fps in this test either – this result is reliant on multi frame gen, and while it looks smoother in action than on the 9070 XT, playing the game on the 5070 at these settings isn’t a great experience. Both GPUs simply have too low a base frame rate before frame gen is applied.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

The ultimate gaming ray tracing test right now, of course, is Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, but again, AMD has made huge progress with ray tracing, and the 9070 XT generally copes well with this game. In my experience, 60fps is the sweet spot for this game, which has some fistfight action, but doesn’t require super-fast reaction times.

I played this game over Christmas 2024 using a Radeon RX 6950 XT, and I could just about run it at 4K with the high graphics preset, as long as I was happy to tolerate occasional frame rate drops below 30fps, but the 9070 XT is massively better, showing just how far AMD has come with ray tracing.

Even at 4K, the 9070 XT can happily run this game at 4K with the Ultra preset at a 67fps average, and a 59fps 1% low, which is the same result as the RTX 4070 Ti, and a good 5fps in front of the RTX 5070. That’s without any help from FSR as well. Run this game at 1440p and it’s even better, with the 9070 XT averaging 105fps, again sitting between the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4080.

The really interesting test in this game, though, is the path tracing mode that you can access with the Full RT settings. All these settings were previously missing from the graphics menu on last-gen AMD GPUs, but they appear now on the 9070 XT, along with support for FSR upscaling and frame gen.

With these settings maxed out using the Supreme preset, the game eats VRAM for breakfast, with the 12GB RTX 5070 stuttering along at just 5fps, if it even managed to get through the test. Comparatively, the 16GB 9070 XT can at least actually run the game at these settings without falling over. However, the experience is absolutely horrible, and can’t be recommended, even just at 1,920 x 1,080. You have to enable frame gen to run this game with the Full RT settings maxed out, and 48fps with frame gen enabled makes for a stuttery, unplayable experience, as the starting frame rate is so low.

FSR frame gen also behaved erratically in my testing in this game compared to DLSS frame gen. I thought I might be able to at least get the base level Full RT setting running with the Ultra graphics preset on the 9070 XT with frame gen enabled, but even though the average frame rate went up, it jumped all over the place, with big drops on a regular basis.

On the flip side, the RTX 5070 can’t run the game at these settings either, as it doesn’t have enough VRAM. Yes, you could run it at the Ultra preset on the RTX 5070 with multi frame gen and get a massively faster frame rate, but this isn’t a game that you need sky high frame rates to play, and the 9070 XT handles the standard Ultra settings just fine.

Doom Eternal

Finally, our Doom Eternal benchmark again showcases the raw power of the 9070 XT. With no ray tracing enabled, and the game maxed out at 4K with the Ultra Nightmare settings, the 9070 XT averages 307fps, with a 190fps 1% low. This puts the new GPU in front of all the last-gen AMD GPUs, and again sees it nestling between the RTX 4070 Ti and 4080. Comparatively, the RTX 5070’s 226fps average is a long way behind.

You’re also perfectly fine to add ray tracing to the mix. At 2,560 x 1,440 with ray tracing, again using the Ultra Nightmare settings, the 9070 XT averages 322fps, a superb result that’s again in front of all the last-gen AMD GPUs and the RTX 4070 Ti.

Even 4K is easily achievable on this GPU with ray tracing, where the 9070 XT averages 192fps, 48fps ahead of the RTX 5070. Admittedly, you can enable DLSS on the RTX 5070, and there’s no support for FSR in this game, but the frame rates are already so good on the 9070 XT that this is barely an issue.

Power draw

There’s one big downside to the 9070 XT, and that’s its power draw, and these figures aren’t helped by the fact that we’ve tested an overclocked sample from ASRock, with 130MHz added to the boost clock. There’s only one GPU that drew more power than the ASRock 9070 XT in our tests, and that’s the RTX 5090, with this 9070 XT card having similar power draw to the RTX 4090 when running games.

Our test system pulled 525W from the mains with the ASRock Taichi 9070 XT installed, and we recommend using at least an 850W PSU for this card. This is one area where the RTX 5070 absolutely wins out, with our system only drawing 369W from the mains with the Nvidia card running at full pelt. Comparatively, the Radeon RX 9070 is much more power-frugal, drawing just 395W in our tests at full load. There’s a price to pay for all that extra clock speed, and it comes in the form of power draw.

Of course, the extra clock speed from our overclocked card was undoubtedly responsible for a good chunk of this figure, so I also ran our power draw test with the GPU clocked down to the standard 2.97GHz figure. At this speed, our system drew 487W with the 9070 XT card (with a 2fps impact on frame rates in F1 24), which isn’t as high as the RTX 4090, but is still a good deal more than the RTX 5080, and a lot more than the RTX 5070.

On the plus side, the chunky cooler on this ASRock model with its three fans does a great job of keeping this clocked-up GPU cool. The maximum GPU temperature only hit 52°C during our tests, with a peak hot spot temperature of 89°C. The fans spun up to 1,480rpm during testing, and they were surprisingly quiet as well. Flick the switch on the top to the Quiet BIOS and the clock speed drops to 2.97GHz, with the fans topping out at 999rpm – it’s wonderfully quiet and only a little slower.

Price

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT price is $599 at MSRP, with overclocked cards demanding more money. That’s a fantastic price for the performance on offer, and while it’s $50 more expensive than the RTX 5070, it’s worth it for the quicker frame rates and extra VRAM for future proofing.

Alternatives

AMD Radeon RX 9070

With much lower power draw and a slightly cheaper price, the 9070 XT’s little sibling is also a prime contender that largely beats the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070. It has the same 16GB of VRAM and FSR 4 support, and it copes well with our game tests as well. If you have a PSU that can cope with it, though, you may as well pay the extra $50 and get the faster 9070 XT. Read our full AMD Radeon RX 9070 review.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070

Nvidia’s $549 card has the benefit of multi frame gen, meaning you can get super-smooth frame rates in games that support it, as long as you’re already starting at a decent frame rate in the first place – if you want to max out all the eye candy in Cyberpunk 2077, then it’s a great choice. The RTX 5070 is slower than the 9070 XT everywhere else, though, and it also only comes with 12GB of VRAM. Read our full Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 review.

Verdict

Welcome back, AMD, we were worried about you for a while then, but you’ve done it. The Radeon RX 9070 XT is a mid-range GPU triumph. It might not have multi frame gen, but that hardly seems to matter when a GPU is this powerful at its starting point. Across nearly all of our tests, the 9070 XT is significantly quicker than the RTX 5070, even in games with ray tracing enabled, and it has loads of shader power at its disposal as well. The fact that this GPU even beats the RTX 5080 in some tests is simply incredible for the price.

Meanwhile, FSR 4 has finally given AMD the tech it needs to compete with Nvidia when it comes to resolution upscaling. It looks fantastic, even on the Performance setting, and it represents a monumental leap forward from FSR 3.

It’s not all great news, of course. The power consumption is ridiculously high, especially on our overclocked sample, and FSR 4 is only supported in a handful of games too – on other games, you’ll be stuck with older versions of FSR that look horrible compared to DLSS.

However, AMD has given its best new GPU the right amount of VRAM, a decent spec and, most importantly, the right price, finally providing Nvidia with some much-needed, credible competition. If you’re in the market for a new graphics card that costs under $600, then make no mistake, the Radeon RX 9070 XT is the one to buy.

Don’t forget to follow us on Google News for daily PC hardware news, reviews, and guides, and join our community Discord to discuss the review and all the other latest goings on in the PC hardware world.