AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Review

For the last couple of generations, AMD has been desperately trying to compete with Nvidia at the high end. However, now, with the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, Team Red has ceded the ultra-high-end to the RTX 5090 and is instead focused on making the best graphics card for the majority of gamers – a goal it absolutely achieves.

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is a $599 graphics card that trades blows with the $749 GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. That alone sets it up as one of the best GPUs on the market today – but AMD further sweetens the deal with FSR 4, finally bringing AI upscaling to an AMD graphics card for the first time. Simply put, this is the graphics card to get for 4K gaming, especially if you don’t have $1,999 to mindlessly blow on the RTX 5090.

Specs and Features

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is built on the RDNA 4 architecture, and while it brings improvements to its shader cores, the real stars of the show are the new RT and AI Accelerators. The AI Accelerators, in particular, are the driving force behind FidelityFX Super Resolution 4, or FSR 4, which brings AI upscaling to AMD graphics cards for the first time. This new AI upscaling doesn’t necessarily improve framerates over games using the older FSR 3.1 model, but it greatly improves accuracy – meaning better image quality. Luckily, if you care more about the framerates, there’s a nice little toggle in the Adrenalin software that lets you turn off FSR 4 entirely.

But it’s more than just AI upscaling. AMD has also made huge improvements to its shader cores, resulting in better performance on a per-core level. So, despite the Radeon RX 9070 XT having 64 Compute Units, compared to 84 in the previous-generation Radeon RX 7900 XT, AMD was able to deliver a sizable generational leap – and with a much lower launch price this time around. Each of these Compute Units has 64 Streaming Multiprocessors, or SMs, making for a total of 4,096, along with 64 ray accelerators and 128 AI accelerators.

However, the Radeon RX 9070 XT also has less memory than the RX 7900 XT, coming in at 16GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus, rather than 20GB of GDDR6 on a wider 320-bit bus. That’s a hit to both capacity and bandwidth, but it’s still enough to get by in most games at 4K. Still, given that AMD is still on GDDR6, it would have been nice to not get this downgrade at all.

While the new architecture is more efficient, the RX 9070 XT has a higher power budget than the 7900 XT that came before, though not by much. The 9070 XT needs 304W of power, compared to 300W with the older card. It’s an odd increase, especially because in my testing, I found that the 7900 XT still consumed more power, peaking at 314W, compared to 306W from the 9070 XT.

This is a pretty standard power budget in a modern graphics card, so cooling it won’t be too challenging. Unlike any other generation, though, AMD is not launching a reference design for the Radeon RX 9070 XT, which means you’ll have to rely on third-party manufacturers for this GPU. I received the Powercolor Radeon RX 9070 XT Reaper for review, with a surprisingly narrow triple-fan design. Despite its small footprint, though, it still kept the temperature at 72°C throughout my test suite.

AMD is still sticking with standard power connectors too, with the Radeon RX 9070 XT needing two 8-pin PCI-E power connectors, with no meltable adapters in sight. This makes it an easy upgrade for pretty much anyone, provided you have the 700W power supply AMD recommends. As for ports, you get three DisplayPort 2.1a and one HDMI 2.1b, which is exactly what you would expect from a modern graphics card. I do wish AMD would add a USB-C port, though, just for more flexibility.

FSR 4

For years now, AMD has needed an AI upscaling solution that could go toe-to-toe with DLSS. Because while the performance was certainly there with the existing versions of FidelityFX Super Resolution, it has been plagued with ghosting and fuzziness from the word go. AMD addresses that with the Radeon RX 9070 XT, with the AI-powered FSR 4.

Just like DLSS, FSR 4 utilizes the AI accelerators in the Compute Units to analyze previous frames, along with other data from the game engine, in order to accurately upscale a lower-resolution image up to your native resolution. The result does look better than FSR 3, which used a Temporal upscaling solution instead of AI, though it does come with a bit of a performance hit.

In Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 at 4K Extreme settings with FSR 3.1 set to “Performance”, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT was able to get 134 fps. However, swap that over to FSR 4, and that number goes down to about 121 fps, a 10% performance loss, albeit with better image quality, especially in things like grass or in-game text. Likewise, in Monster Hunter Wilds, the 9070 XT was able to get 94 fps at 4K max settings with both FSR 3 and ray tracing enabled, but dropped to 78 fps when using FSR 4 – a 20% drop in performance.

That’s a bummer, I know, but really it makes sense. By its very nature, an AI upscaling solution is a more expensive workload than the temporal solution AMD was using in the past. I even checked in with AMD and I was told the performance drop was totally expected behavior, and that AMD is hoping the improved image quality will make up for the performance drop. That’s of course going to vary person to person, but it’s worth it if you primarily play single-player games where image quality is more important than raw frame rate.

Luckily, it’s not like FSR 3.1 is going away any time soon. FSR 4 is an opt-in feature: you can easily go into the Adrenalin software and toggle FSR 4 off. In fact, it was turned off by default on my review sample, though that could have been because of early drivers.

Performance

AMD really came out swinging with the Radeon RX 9070 XT. At $599, it undercuts the Nvidia Geforce RTX 5070 Ti by a whopping 21%, but ends up being, on average, 2% faster. There are games where the RTX 5070 Ti beats the Radeon RX 9070 XT, but the fact that these two graphics cards are trading blows at all is a win for AMD.

Across my whole test suite, I found that the RX 9070 XT was about 17% faster than the RX 7900 XT – which launched at $899 2 years ago – and 2% faster than the new $749 RTX 5070 Ti. But where this card really shines, especially considering its cost, is at 4K. AMD maintains the same lead at that resolution, making the 9070 XT the ultimate entry-level 4K graphics card, even with ray tracing enabled.

I tested all graphics cards on the most recent drivers available. That means all Nvidia cards were tested with Game Ready Driver 572.60, except for the RTX 5070, which is still on review drivers at the time of writing. All AMD cards were tested on Adrenalin 24.12.1, except for the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070, which were tested on pre-release drivers provided by AMD.

While 3DMark isn’t a game you can actually play, it still gives a good look at how the potential of each graphics card compares to one another. It’s rare that it reflects real world performance, but it generally gives you a good idea what to expect. And, well, the 9070 XT beats the 7900 XT by 18% in Speed Way, even though it’s 18% behind the RTX 5070 Ti. However, swap to the Steel Nomad benchmark, and the story shifts altogether. The performance jump over the Radeon RX 7900 XT jumps to 26%, and the 9070 XT even beats the more expensive RTX 5070 Ti by 7%.

In Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, the Radeon RX 9070 XT pulls ahead of the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti by 15%. However, it’s clear that this game favors AMD hardware, with the Radeon RX 7900 XT only losing to the new graphics card by 6%.

Cyberpunk 2077 has always performed best on Nvidia cards, so it’s not a surprise that the 5070 Ti beats the Radeon RX 9070 XT, but by less than in previous generations. The Radeon RX 9070 XT gets 71 fps at 4K with the Ray Tracing Ultra preset with FSR 3 set to performance mode. The RTX 5070 Ti with the same settings, but DLSS set to performance mode, gets 75 fps. That’s only a 5% lead, despite the huge price gap.

Metro Exodus is another game with heavy ray tracing, though this one is tested with no upscaling at all. At 4K, the Radeon RX 9070 XT is able to manage 47 fps, which is within the margin of error of the RTX 5070 Ti’s 48 fps. The last-generation Radeon RX 7900 XT really struggles here, only getting 38 fps, making for a 24% jump.

While it's old, Red Dead Redemption 2 is a great showcase of Vulkan performance, and it scales extremely well on the 9070 XT. In everyone’s favorite cowboy-em-up, the Radeon RX 9070 XT gets 125 fps with everything cranked, with the RTX 5070 Ti trailing behind at 110 fps. The 7900 XT trails a bit further behind at 106 fps.

Unfortunately, the winning streak can’t go on forever, with the Radeon RX 9070 XT falling 13% behind the RTX 5070 Ti in Total War: Warhammer 3. What’s worse is with 76 fps the 9070 XT also doesn’t pull that far ahead of the 7900 XT’s 71 fps.

In Assassins Creed Mirage, the RX 9070 XT gets back on the right foot, with its 163 fps outperforming the RTX 5070 Ti’s 146 fps by 12% and the 7900 XT’s 150 fps by 9%. This is another game that has traditionally favored AMD GPUs, but it's still a huge jump over the competition.

The most surprising RX 9070 XT win is in Black Myth Wukong, where it gets 70 fps at 4K with the Cinematic Preset and FSR set to 40%. With those same settings and DLSS, the RTX 5070 Ti gets 65 fps, making for an 8% lead in Team Red’s favor. Black Myth Wukong has a lot of intense ray tracing effects, something AMD hasn’t beat Nvidia at before. It’s incredible how much the Ray Accelerators have improved over RDNA 3, too – the Radeon RX 7900 XT only gets 60 fps, despite having more Compute Units.

Forza Horizon 5 is also getting up there in years, but the Radeon RX 9070 XT still beats the competition, getting 158 fps over the 5070 Ti’s 151 fps. That’s only a 5% improvement, but it demonstrates just how aggressive the 9070 XT is.

Due to how it was announced under the radar at CES 2025, it felt like AMD was holding the Radeon RX 9070 XT as some kind of secret weapon against Nvidia’s Blackwell graphics cards, and I’m glad it did. At $599, the Radeon RX 9070 XT seems like a sort of return to sanity for the graphics card market. Sure, it’s not quite as fast as the RTX 5080 or the RTX 5090, but those cards are overkill for most people – and cost at least $400+ more.

I know I’m not the only one that feels like the last great flagship graphics card was the GTX 1080 Ti when it launched for $699 in 2017. That was the fastest consumer card of its time, and while the 9070 XT can’t quite make that claim, it still feels like the first worthy flagship we’ve seen since then.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra