AMD Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT reviews: Strong performance at a price that challenges NVIDIA

Note: This review was first published on 5 March 2025.

When AMD shared the preliminary benchmark results and pricings of their new Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, I was truly excited. For years, Team Red has played catch-up in the GPU market, often undercutting NVIDIA with more affordable but generally less capable cards that were let down by poor and inconsistent driver support. With the new GPUs, AMD is keeping to the same pricing strategy but this time around, packed in enough performance to make both cards legitimate contenders in the mid-range segment.

Historically, AMD’s Achilles heel has been its upscaling and frame generation tech and ray tracing, where NVIDIA’s GPUs have enjoyed a comfortable lead for the last two generations. With improved 4K and ray tracing capabilities, plus the promise of its latest version AI-powered upscaling technology, FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4), AMD is hoping to close the gap in ways it hasn’t before. I’ve spent the past few days with both cards and found that while they aren’t perfect, at US$549 and US$599 respectively, they offer a very very compelling alternative to NVIDIA’s own mid-range offerings, especially when you consider that the 9070 XT undercuts the RTX 5070 Ti by a significant US$150.

The Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT are built on AMD’s new RDNA 4 architecture, featuring upgraded compute units, improved ray tracing accelerators, and second-generation AI cores. The base RX 9070 comes with 56 compute units, 56 ray accelerators, and 112 AI accelerators, while the XT variant bumps those numbers up slightly, adding eight more compute units and 16 additional AI cores. Specs wise, these cards may seem inferior to last generations’ flagships Radeon RX 7900 XT and the RX 7900 XTX but don’t let the numbers fool you.

Perhaps the biggest highlight of the new RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT is that both come with a more generous 16GB of VRAM – albeit the slower (but cheaper) GDDR6. It’s a clever play on AMD’s part given that NVIDIA has stuck with just 12GB on its US$549 RTX 5070. You see, not only will having more VRAM future-proof a card to some extent but a 192-bit memory bus also has lower theoretical bandwidth limit compared to a 256-bit one. This means data transfer between the GPU and memory is slower, impacting performance in memory-intensive workloads such as high-resolution gaming and ray tracing, where larger textures and assets need to be loaded quickly.

Sadly, AMD has stayed away from making their own reference cards for the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT GPUs. It’s a shame because, like NVIDIA, AMD makes some very good quality and good-looking reference cards. Instead, AMD sent over the PowerColor Hellhound Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics cards. Both cards are almost indistinguishable from each other, except that the Hellhound RX 9070 XT comes in a larger 3.5-slot design to accommodate the thicker heatsink. The Hellhound RX 9070 on the hand, comes in a 2.5-slot design and is about a quarter lengthier than the RTX 5070 FE by comparison.

AMD has also abstained from the 12V-2x6 power connector and stuck with the standard dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors. This removes the need for proprietary adapters but does make cable management just a wee bit more inconvenient.

Now that you have had a good overview of the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, let’s check out the cards’ performances.

Our test rig

We are using the same test rig for all of our past graphics card reviews including the existing GeForce RTX 50 Series as well as the AMD Radeon RX 7900 series, and comes with the following specifications:

• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
• ROG Maximus Z890 Hero
• Samsung 990 Pro 1TB SSD
• Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5
• Windows 11 Home 64-bit
• ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG32UCDM 4K Gaming Monitor

For this review, I’ll be comparing the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT cards not only with the Radeon 7900 series but also all of the GeForce RTX 40 and 50 Series cards.

Gaming performance (rasterization)

Performance-wise, both the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT turned in solid numbers – besting the RTX 5070 and in some games even outpacing the RTX 5070 Ti. Looking at the benchmark results, it’s hard not to notice that the RX 9070 XT is also not that far off the pace from AMD’s last-gen flagship, the US$999 Radeon RX 7900 XTX. The RX 9070 is equally impressive too, outperforming its direct rival, the RTX 5070, in all games but Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Remember, the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT are priced at US$549 and US$599 respectively. In essence, for the same price the RX 9070 is outperforming NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5070 and the RX 9070 XT is literally breathing down the neck of the more expensive RTX 5070 Ti (US$749).

FSR and ray tracing performance

FSR 4 is a key selling point for AMD’s latest GPUs, but it’s still very much a work in progress. AMD says the new model focuses on cleaner upscaling rather than raw performance boosts. Visually, these improvements are subtle, with finer textures appearing a bit sharper, but there are occasional artefacts—similar to what was seen in DLSS’ early iterations. Meanwhile, only 35 games support FSR 4 right now but the number is expected to increase to over 75 titles before the end of 2025. In contrast, DLSS 4 was launched with 75 games supporting it. AMD clearly still has its work cut out with getting developers to adopt FSR 4. But for games that support it, like Horizon Zero Dawn (Remastered) that we see here, the boost in performance is impressive as the RX 9070 XT almost caught up to the DLSS-enabled RTX 5080.

AMD has brought pretty good ray tracing generational improvements for the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT GPUs, versus the Radeon RX 7900 series. But clearly, there's still a lot of catching up to do. As we can see above, both cards do not perform very well with ray tracing enabled in Cyberpunk 2077 (and with FSR 3 turned on) against even the older RTX 40 Series cards.

AI and content creation

NVIDIA still holds the trump card when it comes to AI and content creation workloads, especially with software that are optimised to run on the GeForce RTX cards' CUDA cores. It's clear that AMD are gunning for the gaming market with the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT GPUs, and while that's not to say you can't use them for tasks outside of gaming, you're better off with a GeForce RTX GPU if content creation is a big part of what you do on your PC (for example, streaming or video editing)

Power and temperature

While both Radeon cards generally outperforms their RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti rivals in games, they do guzzle a lot of electricity. Despite the PowerColor cards coming in a very basic design without flashy RGB lighting, the RX 9070 XT consumes almost as much power as the power-hungry RX 7900 XTX. That said, I don't think this should impact your purchase decision but it'll be prudent to ensure you have at least a 650W PSU.

Final thoughts

For gamers targeting 1440p performance with 4K aspirations, the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT are fantastic alternatives to NVIDIA's mid-range GeForce RTX 5070 and even the RTX 5070 Ti cards. The RX 9070 XT, in particular, is an appealing option at its price point, delivering comparable performance while being significantly cheaper than the RTX 5070 Ti. However, as with the limited stock situation with the RTX 50 Series cards, availability and pricing fluctuations could complicate matters for both Radeon cards. The political situation in the US should be on our minds as well, as it's still unclear if the tit-for-tat tariff implications will affect PC hardware and components costs.

While NVIDIA’s DLSS 4 remains the superior AI upscaling and frame generation technology, AMD’s decision to equip its latest cards with 16GB of memory gives them an edge now and even for future game demands. FSR 4 is limited right now but it has great potential to finally rival DLSS, and if AMD continues refining it, the gap between its AI-powered upscaling tech and DLSS could narrow further.

Ultimately, the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT are not positioned as high-end 4K-gaming graphics cards, but at US$549 and US$599 it need not be. AMD’s move to focus on the mid-range segment instead of the high-end one makes sense – it’s where most buyers are, and these GPUs offer a much-needed refresh for Radeon’s lineup. While they may not dethrone NVIDIA’s dominance anytime soon, the Radeon RX 9070, and especially the RX 9070 XT, make a solid case for choosing AMD in a market that has long been tilted in the other direction and hopefully, jolt the competition into rethinking their own pricing strategy.

Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.