AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 review: Excellent value, if supply is good

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 Test Setup

This is mostly going to be a rehash of what we've said in other recent reviews, as our testing hasn't changed. At the end of last year, just in time for the Arc B580 launch, we revamped our test suite and our test PC, wiping the slate clean and requiring new benchmarks for every graphics card we want to have in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy.

That takes time, and we've been busy trying to keep up with the new graphics card launches — because it's not just the eight new GPUs that have launched since December, but a bunch of prior generation cards to use for comparison. We also need to retest some of the first cards we put through our new suite, as driver updates and game patches have certainly impacted a few of the results.

Like Nvidia's 50-series GPUs, AMD has some new technologies coming into play with the RX 9000-series RDNA 4 GPUs. FSR 4, AMD's new AI-powered upscaling and frame generation algorithm, requires an RDNA 4 GPU. Perhaps AMD will figure out how to backport the technology to RDNA 3 and even RDNA 2 GPUs, but given the discrepancies in AI compute potential, it likely won't look as good. But while there are games that already support FSR 4, we're going to focus initially on the base level performance. Page six will have the results when they're ready, but that's going to take a bit longer.

Our GPU test PC has an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor, the fastest current CPU for gaming purposes. We also have 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory from G.Skill with AMD EXPO timing enabled (CL30) on an ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard.

We're running Windows 11 24H2, with the latest drivers at the time of testing. We used AMD's 25.2.1 drivers for the 7000-series GPUs and AMD's preview 24.30.31.03 for the 9070 cards. For the Nvidia GPUs, we've used several different drivers from the 572 family, depending on when the particular GPUs were tested. We haven't had time to retest everything on the latest releases, unfortunately, but we've retested a few games and apps where earlier results seemed to not correlate with later testing.

Our PC is hooked up to an MSI MPG 272URX QD-OLED display, which supports G-Sync and Adaptive-Sync, allowing us to properly experience the higher frame rates that RTX 50-series GPUs with MFG are supposed to be able to reach. Most games won't get anywhere close to the 240Hz limit of the monitor at 4K when rendering at native resolution, which is where framegen and MFG can be useful.

Our new GPU test suite currently consists of 22 games. We're still looking at some potential changes and additions, but this is where we're at for now. Six of the games in our standard test suite have RT support enabled. The remaining 16 games are run in pure rasterization mode. However, we'll be looking at supplemental testing in the coming days to further investigate full RT along with FSR 4 upscaling and framegen. (That testing is still ongoing, but check page six to see if we've added anything.)

All 22 games are tested without any upscaling or frame generation as our baseline. Again, we plan to do additional investigations into things like FSR 2/3/4 and DLSS 2/3/4 along with framegen/MFG, but that will be separate from the primary testing. There are noticeable differences between the image quality of DLSS, FSR, and XeSS, as well as differences in how much they can affect performance, which is why we're not using any of them for our baseline measurements.

All games are tested using 1080p 'medium' settings (the specifics vary by game and are noted in the chart headers), along with 1080p, 1440p, and 4K 'ultra' settings. This provides a good overview of performance in a variety of situations. Depending on the GPU, some of those settings don't make as much sense as others, but seeing how fast cards like the RTX 5090 and 5080 run at 1080p can be enlightening.

Our OS has all the latest updates applied. We're also using Nvidia's PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during our gaming benchmarks. We'll cover those results on page eight.

Finally, because GPUs aren't purely for gaming these days, we run some professional and AI application tests. We've previously tested Stable Diffusion, using various custom scripts, but to level the playing field and hopefully make things a bit more manageable (AI is a fast moving field!), we're turning to standardized benchmarks.

We use Procyon and run the AI Vision test as well as the Stable Diffusion 1.5 and XL tests; MLPerf Client 0.5 preview for AI text generation; SPECworkstation 4.0 for Handbrake transcoding, AI inference, and professional applications; 3DMark DXR Feature Test to check raw hardware RT performance; and finally Blender Benchmark 4.3.0 for professional 3D rendering.

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