AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs is arriving next week — and its new graphics cards are aggressively priced against Nvidia’s $749 GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and $549 RTX 5070. The AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT ship on March 6th for $549 and $599, respectively, one day after the RTX 5070 arrives.
AMD says they both offer “4K gaming at a 1440p price,” though it’s making some unusual comparisons to do so — according to AMD, the 9070 XT is 51 percent faster on average than a four-year-old RX 6900 XT at 4K and max settings and 26 percent faster than a four-year-old RTX 3090 at the same settings, cards that filled a pricey niche two generations ago.
While leaks had suggested the pricing of AMD’s 9070 could start at $649, AMD surprised everyone today with suggested retail prices at $549 for this card — putting it head-to-head with Nvidia’s $549 RTX 5070. The $599 9700 XT could even challenge Nvidia’s $749 pricing for its RTX 5070 Ti, as long as AMD has managed to deliver performance that can challenge both of these RTX 50-series cards.
We won’t know the full answer to that until reviews for AMD’s cards appear next week as well as reviews for Nvidia’s RTX 5070. AMD is dropping some performance hints about where its 9070 series cards might fit in, though. AMD says the 9070 XT is 42 percent more potent at 4K Ultra (and 38 percent at 1440p Ultra) than AMD’s RX 7900 GRE, a card that challenged the RTX 4070 at $549 but vanished after less than a year. And it’s “just barely slightly slower” than a 7900 XTX, AMD’s 2022 flagship, we heard on a call.
Image: AMD
The vanilla RX 9070, meanwhile, is 21 percent faster than the same 7900 GRE at 4K, suggesting it’s not far off the XT in performance: 38 percent faster than the AMD 6800 XT and 26 percent faster than the Nvidia RTX 3080, according to AMD. At 220 watts of board power, AMD’s director of graphics product management, Scott Olschewsky, says the 4nm monolithic chip is “the most efficient GPU we’ve ever built.”
Each card also offers 16GB of GDDR6 memory, DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1b ports, and are PCIe 5.0 cards — not that your motherboard needs a 5.0 new slot or would necessarily benefit from one. They will use standard 8-pin PCIe power connectors.
Image: AMD
While both the 9070 and 9070 XT have far fewer graphics compute units than the 7900 GRE (55, 64, and 80, respectively), they don’t need as many because they’re the first cards to ship with RDNA 4, which AMD says offers twice the rasterization (read: non-ray traced) graphics performance per compute unit as RDNA 2. (RDNA 3 was closer to 1.4x that of RDNA 2.)
AMD says it’s taken larger steps than that in ray tracing, too, and almost fully doubled its FP16 machine learning performance since RDNA 3, and up to 779 TOPS, though performance will differ from app to app: AMD’s only seeing 12 percent more performance in Adobe Lightroom super resolution over the 7900 GRE, as one example.
But even if you’re not playing with AI very intentionally, AMD will put that hardware to use in gaming with FSR 4, which comes with a new AI upscaling algorithm for its super resolution tech that’ll exclusively run on these RDNA 4 and newer cards.
Olschewsky says FSR 4 can increase frame rates “while looking just as good as native rendering” at 4K resolution. AMD used some images from Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 — a title that averages just 53fps at 4K Ultra settings — to show more fine detail in the distant background of an image while averaging at 182fps with FSR 4 and frame generation turned on.
And while AMD didn’t share expected performance for that game without the fake frames added, it did break out the differences for a handful of other games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Ratchet & Clank:
AMD says it’ll have 30 FSR4 games at launch and over 75 by the end of the year — one obvious theme is a lot of PS5 games, making us wonder how closely the PS5 Pro’s “PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution,” an AI upscaler powered by AMD hardware, might be related to it. But AMD also says FSR 3.1 games can be updated to FSR 4 “with a simple toggle.”
The new cards also have an enhanced media engine with higher image quality for gameplay recording, as the last one “did not meet quality expectations from the gamers trying to record and stream.” AMD says its Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF), its generic fake frame generation you can apply to any game yourself, is being upgraded to AFMF 2.1, with less ghosting and smearing of details.
As with any graphics card these days, the actual amount you pay will be determined by whether AMD can actually make enough of the things, and if AMD’s board partners don’t jack up the price. Olschewsky had some fighting words for Nvidia there, though: “We believe that our 9070 XT will be going toe-to-toe with what you’ve seen from the 5070 Ti that users may or may not be able to buy,” adding that the 9070 “is going to look very strong against their upcoming 5070.”
Unlike Nvidia, which warned of shortages with its new cards, he says AMD expects “strong availability at launch.”
“We are working with all of our partners to go and deliver the most competitive prices on GPUs around the world; our focus is ensuring cards hit target price points around the world. It’s difficult to predict what’s going to happen, but we’ll be working with partners as we see pricing show up.”
At the end of AMD’s event today the company also teased that its RX 9060 series cards will arrive in the second quarter to “broaden the family even further.” AMD plans to disclose more information about these cards “later,” but it certainly looks like it’s getting ready to challenge Nvidia’s unannounced RTX 5060 cards.
