AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT target ‘4K gaming at a 1440p price’

The long wait is over. After kinda-sorta-teasing the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT at CES 2025, AMD is finally pulling back the curtain on its next-generation graphics cards today, ahead of a March 6 launch date. Meet the rival to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50-series.

AMD shuffled Radeon’s branding this generation to mirror Nvidia’s; the Radeon RX 9070 XT will thus compete with the RTX 5070 Ti, while the Radeon RX 9070 takes aim at the 9070.

Normally, I’d infuse this preview with analysis and commentary, but AMD declined to share 9070 pricing with press in a pre-announcement briefing. It’ll be revealed in the company’s Radeon RX 9070 stream this morning. Since pricing is so crucial to the story of the Radeon RX 9070, I’ll skip most deeper analysis below and instead focus simply on sharing the hardware and software information AMD provided press.

Let’s start with an overview of the improvements found in AMD’s new RDNA 4 graphics architecture, before moving onto details about the Radeon RX 9070 series specifically, and what’s coming with FSR 4 and Hypr-RX.

Meet AMD’s RDNA 4

One thing revealed in AMD’s CES teaser: The Radeon 9000-series is built from the ground up for an AI future.

Until now, AMD mostly used traditional GPU features for its FSR upscaling technology, while Nvidia’s AI-powered DLSS kept advancing both performance and image quality. No more. The Radeon RX 9070’s new RDNA 4 graphics architecture was designed from the ground up to incorporate a heavier AI focus, which works hand-in-hand with AMD’s new FSR 4 technology (more on that later) to bring the heat to Nvidia. You can see the block diagram and high-level performance claims for RDNA 4’s second-gen AI accelerators above.

AMD

AMD also invested heavily in improving Radeon’s ray tracing performance, which has always lagged behind Nvidia (and recently, Intel). The company says RDNA 4’s compute units (the building blocks of Radeon GPUs) deliver twice the ray tracing throughput of the RDNA 3 CUs inside today’s graphics cards. AMD also changed the Radeon RX 9070 XT’s memory subsystem to more efficiently process ray tracing tasks.

That doesn’t necessarily mean Radeon RX 9000-series ray tracing will be twice as fast as the 7000-series — RT performance is more complicated than that — but it should be significantly better than before.

AMD

You can see above how the third-gen ray tracing cores and second-gen AI accelerators fit into RDNA 4’s new compute units. AMD told reporters that RDNA 4’s compute units are 40 percent faster than RDNA 3’s. RDNA 4 also includes an enhanced media engine, promising up to 20 percent higher visual quality for content creators.

Meet the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT

Now that you know about the RDNA 4 architecture, it’s time to see how AMD is putting it to work. AMD says the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT are built for 4K gaming at a 1440p price.

AMD

As per AMD tradition, the Radeon RX 9070 is a slightly cut-down version of the top-end 9070 XT, running at noticeably lower clock speeds (and significantly less power). Both 9070 cards offer 16GB of GDDR6 memory paired with a 256-bit bus, PCIe 5.0 support, standard 8-pin power connectors, HDMI 2.1b, and DisplayPort 2.1a.

Now, let’s peek at performance.

AMD claims the Radeon RX 9070 XT will deliver 51 percent more performance than the flagship Radeon GPU of last last generation, the Radeon 6900 XT. In a briefing with reporters, AMD representatives told the press that the 9070 XT is pretty similar to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4080 in traditional “raster” gaming performance. That should put it roughly on par with the new GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.

The Radeon RX 9070, meanwhile, should be 38 percent faster than the Radeon RX 6800 XT, and 26 percent faster than the uber-popular RTX 3080. AMD told reporters it expects the 9070 to look “really strong” compared to Nvidia’s $550 GeForce RTX 5070, which launches next week.

FSR 4 FTW?

RDNA 4 was built to work hand-in-hand with FSR 4, the first iteration of AMD’s performance-boosting upscaling and frame generation software designed to leverage AI. Previously, almost all FSR tasks ran on traditional GPU hardware.

Doing so lets AMD mirror Nvidia’s DLSS claims: AMD says FSR 4 delivers large performance boosts with image quality that can match or even surpass native visuals (depending on your Quality settings, of course). While the proof lies in how FSR 4 runs in motion, AMD released some screenshots showing its visual quality in specific zoomed-in details…

…as well as some performance results looking at FSR 4 Upscaling and Upscaling + Frame Generation compared to native 4K.

While Nvidia pushed DLSS 4’s Frame Generation feature to insert up to three AI-generated images between traditional frames, AMD’s FSR sticks to inserting a single generated frame between standard frames. It still provides a big boost in visual smoothness.

Better yet, you’ll be able to use FSR 4 in a fairly large number of games right out of the gate. Integrating new features like this usually takes months and months of effort, with only a few key partner titles available at launch to showcase the technology. Not FSR 4.

AMD

FSR 4 builds atop AMD’s existing FSR 3.1 framework, which allows developers to very quickly integrate the new technology. (Nvidia’s DLSS 4 was similarly designed.) That means not one, not two, but 30+ games will support FSR 4 right at launch, with the number of supported games expected to grow to 75+ by the end of the year. That’s one of the biggest, fastest technology adoptions in history.

And there are some heavy hitters in there, too. AMD makes the chip powering the PlayStation 5, and several Sony games crack FSR 4’s debut lineup, including God of War: Ragnarok, The Last of Us Part I, Horizon: Forbidden West, and the Spider-Man series. Beyond that, blockbusters like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6/Warzone, Marvel Rivals, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine II, and Kingdom Come Deliverance II make the cut.

FSR 4 is exclusive to RDNA 4-based graphics cards, starting with these Radeon RX 9070 offerings; older GPUs will need to use FSR 2 or 3 instead, which are supported over 400 games.

Hypr-RX and AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2.1

AMD is also introducing a new update for its driver-based frame generation technology, AMD Fluid Motion Frames, which can add frame gen to virtually any game. AFMF version 2.1 offers “improved frame generation image quality with reduced ghosting and better temporal tracking” on Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs or later.

AFMF is part of AMD’s Hypr-RX suite of features. Hypr-RX combines and activates several Radeon features in one fell swoop, including driver-based frame generation and upscaling, Radeon Anti-Lag, and Radeon Boost. In unison, these technologies can drastically raise frame rates while lowering latency for ultra-fast performance.

Image quality can sometimes degrade a bit using driver-based upscaling, especially around UI elements, but Hypr-RX can deliver stunning speed improvements in thousands of games. AMD seems to be positioning it against Nvidia’s much-improved DLSS 4 technology with Multiple Frame Generation; MFG looks better, but Hypr-RX works on thousands of games and several generations of Radeon graphics cards.

My take? I’m glad they’re both around. Each is excellent in its own way.

The next-gen battle begins soon

AMD

So there you have it: The Radeon RX 9070 series, the RDNA 4 technology behind it, and the FSR 4 features the hardware helps enable.

Will AMD’s next-gen GPU manage to upset Nvidia? Lots of PC gamers are pretty irritated about the RTX 50-series’ sky-high prices and lackluster performance gains, so AMD definitely has an opening here — but it needs to nail both performance and value to seize the advantage. The Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT launch March 6, so we’ll know where the chips fall sooner than later.