AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT review: The new 1440p gaming champions

Nvidia fumbled the ball with its $549 GeForce RTX 5070, and AMD’s new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT are primed to seize advantage.

The RTX 5070, hitting store shelves today, is a good 1440p graphics card but a stagnant generational sidegrade at best. Enter the $549 Radeon RX 9070 and $599 Radeon RX 9070 XT, launching tomorrow. Both cards are faster than the RTX 5070, with the 9070 XT going toe-to-toe with the $750 RTX 5070 Ti in many games, and each includes an ample 16GB of VRAM. The RTX 5070 is stuck with a disappointing 12GB. Even ray tracing, long an AMD weakness, improved dramatically!

Bottom line? AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 series is the new 1440p gaming champion. If you opt for an RTX 5070 instead to get in on Nvidia’s DLSS 4 greatness, you’re making some major sacrifices in other areas.

We’ve spent the past week testing the XFX Swift Triple Fan Gaming Edition and Asus TUF Gaming OC models of both of these cards. The Asus card is a heavily juiced custom model that sports an extra third power connector compared to other models – all the better to overclock with. Here are the key things you need to know before buying an AMD Radeon RX 9070 or 9070 XT.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT performance benchmarks

Our benchmarks above include results from both the aforementioned XFX and Asus 9070 cards, albeit only at 1440p resolution. We skipped 4K testing to be able to include multiple Radeon 9070 models in these graphs.

The Radeon RX 9070 cards kill it.

Even though AMD’s new GPUs remain well behind Nvidia’s in complex ray tracing scenarios – performance is great in lighter RT loads, however – the $549 Radeon RX 9070 is flat-out faster than the $549 RTX 5070 when you average out the combined results from all games in our suite. All told, the Radeon 9070 runs about 8 percent faster than the RTX 5070 at 1440p. If you omit Black Myth Wukong – a very strenuous game with full, complex ray tracing, and an outlier where all Radeon GPUs noticeably falter – the Radeon RX 9070 is 11 percent faster than the RTX 5070. Wukong is the only game where the 9070 falls behind the 5070’s performance.

But wait! While that’s impressive, the $599 Radeon RX 9070 XT blows both the RTX 5070 as well as the vanilla 9070 out of the water for just $50 more.

Across our suite, the Radeon 9070 XT runs 15 percent faster than the RTX 5070 on average, and 7 percent faster than the vanilla Radeon 9070. Excluding Black Myth Wukong, the 9070 XT runs 19 percent faster than the RTX 5070 – and it comes with 16GB of onboard memory, compared to the RTX 5070’s paltry 12GB. This is a major, major win for AMD.

So major, in fact, that the Radeon RX 9070 XT punches above its weight class to challenge the $750 RTX 5070 Ti. The 5070 Ti is only 6 percent faster than the Radeon 9070, and that plummets to 3 percent if you omit Black Myth.

Sweet holy moley. Did I mention that the RTX 5070 Ti costs $150 more than the Radeon RX 9070 XT? That means you get 3 to 6 percent more performance for a 25 percent jump in price – making the RTX 5070 Ti a terrible value proposition unless you really want DLSS 4 or better AI and creation chops.

One tiny note: The 1 percent lows in Returnal are terribly low, and only on the 9070 GPUs. We’ve made AMD aware of the problem.

AMD’s ray tracing doesn’t suck anymore

Let’s bring back some of our earlier performance graphs, zeroing in on performance in ray traced games specifically.

AMD focused heavily on improving ray tracing performance in RDNA 4, the next-generation graphics architecture powering the Radeon 9000-series. It shows in our benchmarks.

Ray tracing performance was a major Achilles’ Heel for prior Radeon generations. No more – mostly. The Radeon 9070 series performs neck-and-neck with the RTX 5070 in games with moderate to heavy levels of ray tracing. In F1 24 and Returnal, both AMD GPUs actually run faster than the RTX 5070. That’s nothing I ever thought I’d be saying about these new Radeon GPUs.

Adam Patrick Murray spent several days evaluating the 9070’s ray tracing performance in his small form-factor rig, playing RT games first on last generation’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX flagship, then the 9070. He’s still wrapping up final observations for a video – more on that soon – but in general, he reports large leaps forward in ray tracing performance on the 9070 XT.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though. Once games start layering on multiple ray tracing effects and more strenuous RT features, such as path tracing, AMD’s GPUs fall behind Nvidia’s. The RTX 5070 is markedly faster than the Radeon 9070s in Black Myth Wukong as well as Cyberpunk 2077’s grueling RT Overdrive mode. If complex ray tracing matters to you, Nvidia’s cards may be a better option.

16GB of memory FTW

So the Radeon RX 9070 series stomps the RTX 5070’s performance in all but the most strenuous ray traced games at 1440p. But here’s another consideration: The memory configuration of AMD’s offerings is more future-proof and built to run 4K as well. In fact, AMD marketed the Radeon 9070 series as “4K gaming at a 1440p price,” twisting a knife into Nvidia’s ribs.

That’s because Nvidia outfitted the RTX 5070 with just 12GB of memory, paired with a puny 192-bit bus. (Think of a memory bus like a road; the bigger the bus, the more lanes in the road, letting more traffic move more swiftly.) A configuration like that limits the 5070’s potential to 1440p gaming alone; while many games can run at 4K on the RTX 5070, you shouldn’t buy that GPU with 4K gaming in mind.

The Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT, meanwhile, both include an ample 16GB and a wider 256-bit bus. That means two critical things.

One, while our testing focused on 1440p resolution, these cards – especially the 9070 XT – truly are built to handle 4K gaming, even if they’re tuned for prime 1440p performance.

And two, the 16GB of memory makes it much more future-proof in an era where games gobble up ever-increasing amounts of memory, especially with ray tracing and frame generation active. The 12GB GeForce RTX 5070 already runs into issues at maximum settings in a handful of games, like the new Indiana Jones game, because of memory capacity issues.

FSR 4 and Hypr-RX amplify performance

Nvidia placed the fate of the RTX 50-series in DLSS 4’s hands, and more specifically, its excellent new Multi Frame Generation feature. MFG uses AI to insert up to three generated frames between every traditional rendered frame. It doesn’t really improve performance as much as the raw frame rates may lead you to believe, but MFG delivers such a shocking improvement in visual smoothness and raw frame pacing that it’s truly transformative.

AMD has no feature to match that directly – but it does have some performance-boosting software tricks up its sleeve.

First is FSR 4. Prior FSR generations leveraged traditional GPU hardware to upscale images; FSR 4 instead leans on new, vastly improved AI accelerators built into the RDNA 4 architecture to handle upscaling instead, in DLSS-like fashion. We haven’t had much time to play with FSR 4 yet, but the image quality boost over FSR 3.1 is tangible. AMD says FSR 4 will be available in over 30 games at launch, with 75+ games expected to integrate the technology by the end of the year.

The problem? We’ve had a terrible time reliably activating FSR 4 in games, needing to jump through hoops both in-game and in-driver, only for it to fall half the time. It’s an inauspicious start for FSR 4. My bud Adam Patrick Murray details his FSR 4 trials in the video above.

Then there’s Hypr-RX, a great feature with a cringe name.

Hypr-RX is AMD’s name for a one-click feature that activates a bunch of separate Radeon features to supercharge performance in virtually all modern games. AMD supports driver-level FSR, Frame Generation (AMD Fluid Motion Frames), and anti-lag technologies, among others. That means developers don’t need to actively code in support for the features, like they do with DLSS and FSR – it just works. Flipping on Hypr-RX can send frame rates absolutely skyrocketing in almost any game you throw at it.

It’s not as seamless as DLSS 4’s Multi-Frame Gen. Since these are driver-level tools, AMD’s FSR equivalent lacks developer integration, and image quality can sometimes take a hit – blurry interface elements and a general softness in image quality being the biggest offenses. You’ll also want to make sure the game is running at a solid frame rate before activating AMD’s frame gen (Hypr-RX’s upscaling usually takes care of that, especially on the powerful 9070 GPUs). But if you can tolerate some image softness, Hypr-RX is a killer solution that puts the performance pedal to the metal universally. It’s a fantastic, versatile tool.

Nvidia reigns supreme in content and AI workloads

We only ran a couple of non-gaming benchmarks – one focused on Adobe Premiere Pro performance via the fantastic PugetBench benchmark, and Procyon’s AI text generation benchmark, which assaults GPUs with a variety of large language model tests.

The RTX 5070 absolutely stomped the Radeon RX 9070 series in both of these. If you use your graphics card for work as well as play, Nvidia remains the superior option despite AMD’s gaming and memory capacity dominance.

There are no Radeon RX 9070 reference cards

Nvidia’s Founders Edition models are usually among the best GeForce options around. You won’t find an AMD equivalent this generation. All Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT models come from AMD partners like XFX, Sapphire, and Asus. AMD will not be releasing a reference “Made by AMD” version of these GPUs.

That said, the Radeon RX 9070 series utilizes a pair of 8-pin power connectors as standard. Some custom models may opt for an Nvidia-esque 12-pin connector instead, while overclocked models like the Asus TUF sometimes add an additional 8-pin connector to add in power delivery and overclocking. The vast majority of Radeon 9070s will stick to a pair of 8-pins, but check to make sure your chosen GPU meets your power supply specs before you buy.

Should you buy AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT?

The Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT are the new 1440p gaming champions. I’d definitely opt for those over the $549 GeForce RTX 5070, which is just a stagnant sidegrade over its predecessor.

Don’t get me wrong: I adore DLSS 4’s Multi-Frame Generation and consider it truly transformative. The visual smoothness it provides must be seen to be believed. But the $549 Radeon RX 9070 slings frames an average of 11 percent faster than the 5070 if you remove outlier Black Myth Wukong. Paired with a full 16GB of memory and a wide bus that actually allows for 4K gaming, the Radeon RX 9070 feels like an all-around more compelling option for the price, especially now that ray tracing isn’t the Achilles’ Heel it once was for AMD.

But really, the $599 Radeon RX 9070 XT is the graphics card you want if you can snag one. It features the same beefed-up 16GB memory configuration, but spits out frames a whopping 19 percent faster than the RTX 5070 for just $50 more. In fact, it punches closer to the $750 GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. Nvidia’s card is only 3 to 6 percent faster than the 9070 XT despite costing 25 percent more.

So yeah: AMD has a pair of winners on its hands with the Radeon 9070 series.

It’s not quite a perfect landing though. We found AMD’s much-hyped new FSR 4 feature frustrating to (try to) use in real life; bad 1 percent low times in Returnal are a bit of a bummer; Nvidia maintains the lead in content and AI creation; we suffered some driver crashes on all tested 9070 GPUs; and while Hypr-RX is very cool, Radeon still has no answer for DLSS 4 Multi Frame Gen. But the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT offer such a compelling mix of performance, value, and memory capacity that it’s worth accepting those true, valid, concerning quibbles and hope AMD gets its software act together.

Unlike the RTX 5070, AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 series pushes gaming performance forward. I hope AMD made a bunch of them.