AMD’s Breakthrough: Radeon 9070 XT Takes Center Stage
AMD just announced the Radeon 9070 XT. After years of struggling, AMD has finally delivered a graphics card that is both competitive and priced to sell. This success comes as NVIDIA faces challenges in maintaining its dominance.
Both the Radeon 9070 XT and its non-XT counterpart are well-priced at $599 and $550, respectively. These GPUs bring impressive performance, offering excellent 4K gaming, enhanced ray tracing, and AI-powered upscaling. However, AMD maintains its tradition of trade-offs, with some concerns over performance in productivity tasks and power consumption. If supply remains steady, gamers may overlook these drawbacks in favor of a brighter future.
Competitive Performance in 1440p and 4K Gaming
AMD claims these cards are designed for high-resolution gaming, and the Radeon 9070 XT proves it in 1440p rasterization. The XT variant rivals the RTX 5070 Ti while undercutting it by $150, exposing NVIDIA’s high pricing. Even the non-XT model performs admirably, competing closely with the RTX 5070 and occasionally surpassing it, as seen in Alan Wake 2, where it leads by 17%.
However, Black Myth: Wukong marks a notable exception, with the 5070 Ti outperforming the 9070 XT by 9%. Yet, considering price-to-performance, AMD’s small loss turns into a significant win. In Red Dead Redemption 2, both cards suffer from poor 1% lows, leading to frame pacing concerns that AMD will hopefully address post-launch.
At 4K resolution, AMD’s decision to provide sufficient VRAM pays off. While it lacks the speed of GDDR7, the 16GB of GDDR6 ensures smooth gameplay. In The Last of Us Part One, the Radeon 9070 leads by 23% over the RTX 5070 due to better VRAM management. NVIDIA’s decision to limit VRAM proves to be a disadvantage, causing performance hitches in memory-intensive scenarios.
While the 9000 series falls short of delivering true 60 FPS at 4K Ultra settings, its performance gains in ray tracing are significant. AMD’s slides may have overstated the margin over the 7900 GRE, but improvements in path tracing indicate real generational progress.
Architectural Advancements: Smaller, Faster, and More Efficient
The real story behind the Radeon 9070 XT’s success is its new monolithic die, built on TSMC’s N4C process. This compact chip packs 92% of the 7900 XTX’s transistors into just two-thirds of the die area, improving efficiency while maintaining power. Significant enhancements to the compute engine, AI accelerators, and ray tracing cores further solidify its standing.
AMD’s improved media engine also stands out, bringing noticeable enhancements to low-bitrate streaming quality. Though still behind NVIDIA’s NVENC encoding in some scenarios, AMD has significantly narrowed the gap. However, the lack of 4:2:2 hardware encoding may deter professional video editors from switching.
DisplayPort 2.1a’s implementation is another mixed bag. While these GPUs can achieve 4K at 240Hz, they rely on Display Stream Compression (DSC). While DSC artifacts are barely noticeable, some users may find NVIDIA’s UHBR 20 implementation superior.
Ray Tracing: A Competitive Edge, But Not Quite There
Ray tracing performance shows AMD making significant strides. The Radeon 9070 XT competes closely with the RTX 5070 in Alan Wake 2, highlighting NVIDIA’s underwhelming 50-series performance. However, the 5070 Ti surpasses the 9070 XT, proving NVIDIA still holds an edge in high-end ray tracing.
In Black Myth: Wukong, the new AMD cards outperform their predecessors but lag behind NVIDIA’s latest offerings. Despite substantial improvements, AMD remains a generation behind in ray tracing, though the gap continues to close. Issues such as ghosting in path-traced scenes indicate that further refinements are needed.
Upscaling and AI Performance
FSR 4.0 represents AMD’s best attempt at upscaling yet. Compared to FSR 3.1, artifacting is reduced, and fine-line rendering is vastly improved. Surprisingly, FSR 4 even outperforms DLSS 4 in certain scenarios, such as rendering detailed objects in Horizon Forbidden West.
However, FSR 4.0 still lags behind NVIDIA’s DLSS in performance uplift, particularly in The Last of Us Part One and Horizon Zero Dawn. AMD’s frame generation technology provides a competitive uplift, but support remains a problem. Unlike DLSS 4.0, which runs on older NVIDIA cards, FSR 4.0’s AI-enhanced upscaling is limited to newer AMD GPUs.
AI-powered workloads further reveal AMD’s weaknesses. In Stable Diffusion and text generation, the Radeon 9070 XT barely outperforms the previous generation and falls far behind NVIDIA’s 50-series. AMD’s generous 16GB VRAM ensures compatibility with AI models, but overall AI acceleration remains underwhelming.
