RX 9070 XT performance gradually revealed, is it enough to make Nvidia 'fear'?

At CES 2025 this year, AMD refrained from revealing details about its long-awaited new flagship Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU, which is based on the RDNA 4 architecture. The Red team is changing the naming scheme for its Radeon GPUs (again), with the flagship now being the new Radeon RX 90_0 instead of the previous RX 7_00. However, there are no concrete details on pricing and performance, so we'll have to rely on leaks to judge the situation.

IGN sneakily benchmarked the RX 9070 (not the XT) at CES with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, and it seems to perform really well compared to the RX 7900 XTX, 7800 XT, and 6950 XT we've seen before. The test was performed on the 4K preset without any upscaling/sharpening and framerates. The RX 9070 averaged 99 FPS with a 5% low of 76 FPS and a 1% low of 60 FPS. The benchmark also confirms that the Radeon 9070 has 16GB of VRAM. For comparison, a Reddit user named RevolutionaryCarry57 tested the RX 6950 XT (the RDNA 2 flagship) with identical settings and achieved 80, 62, and 59 FPS respectively.

Following that, the 9070 XT's 3DMark DirectX 12 and Ray Tracing benchmark results were also allegedly leaked and once again, the RDNA 4 architecture seems to be delivering very respectable performance.

In an interview with PCWorld, AMD's Chief Gaming Solutions Architect Frank Azor stated that the Radeon team plans to reveal more details about its new cards in just a few weeks. So it seems likely that AMD will hold a separate launch event for RDNA 4, and also added that it wants to see what Nvidia is doing with the new RTX 5000 series GPUs.

Once again, Frank Azor reiterated that AMD's strategy this time around is to build a mid-range product with RDNA 4 and that this will not be a "$1,000 graphics card." AMD would be foolish enough to price it that high, with the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti starting at $549 and $749, respectively.

Azor also revealed some details about how the Radeon team achieved this level of performance. Most of the development effort in RDNA 4 is around increasing AI compute throughput. Ray tracing will also see some major improvements. This is something to expect from an AMD card when Nvidia and even Intel are doing so well.

AMD explains that AI is a key component with its upcoming ML-based FSR 4 upscaler that will compete directly with Nvidia DLSS and Intel XeSS.

Finally, AMD has pledged that this time around they are taking the criticism and feedback from their previous generation products (the RX 7000 series) seriously and are trying to get the price/performance right for their 9000 series GPUs. If you recall, while the 7900 XTX was praised by reviewers, its cut-down sibling, the 7900 XT, didn't impress as much because it was priced too close to the XTX.

As AMD has stated, if the 9070 XT and 9070 are priced appropriately for their performance and value, then we could finally see a real "Nvidia challenger" from the Radeon brand, not in terms of raw performance but from the core value.

Jessica Tanner

Update 13 January 2025