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AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070: The XT is great, the vanilla card less so
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 represent a big step forward in several areas for AMD. They have significantly improved ray tracing performance, to the point where the RX 9070 XT easily beats the 5070 and comes relatively close to the 5070 Ti. There's also new and improved AI hardware that's not quite as fast as what Nvidia offers, but it should provide some substantial improvements to a variety of workloads. It will also power FSR 4, but we'll have to investigate that more when we have more time.
There's still the question of price and availability. There are a lot of rumors and suggestions that the 9070 cards will have a lot more stock ready for interested buyers than what we've seen from Nvidia, but here's the thing: No one actually knows how many RTX 50-series GPUs have been sold, outside of Nvidia itself. What we do know is that there's massive demand and an ongoing shortage, and it doesn't look like it will clear up any time soon.
Where will prices end up on the RX 9070 XT and 9070 cards? We can only guess. In the meantime, MSRPs are the only thing we can really point to, and AMD has delivered a potentially excellent value proposition with its new GPUs. The 9070 XT, in particular, looks set to be a hot item, as it's roughly 15% faster than the 9070 for 9% more money. It's also only about 5% slower than the RTX 5070 Ti but costs 20% less — in theory.
In practice, of course, Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti is currently sold out at MSRP and commanding prices of potentially over $1,000. We expect the same thing will happen with the RTX 5070 launch this morning — maybe not the $1,000+ prices, but selling out quickly seems almost inevitable. But we'll have to wait and see what happens.
As we noted with the RTX 5070 review, the fundamental problem right now is one of manufacturing capacity. TSMC has the best 5nm-class and 3nm-class processes right now, and the line of companies wanting to order wafers has gotten very large. Most of the orders are likely going to AI hardware, including Nvidia's Blackwell B200 GPUs, which sell for far higher prices — prices that consumer hardware can't really hope to compete with.
AMD competes for those same wafers. And AMD is also using those same wafers for its Ryzen and EPYC CPUs. The CCDs (Core Compute Dies) in Zen 5 are pretty small compared to the Navi 48 GPUs at only 71 mm^2 versus 357 mm^2. AMD can get about five Zen 5 CCDs from the same wafer that provides a single Navi 48. And Zen 5 CCDs going into Ryzen 7 9800X3D are making far more money per unit for AMD than a Radeon GPU.
AMD also has data center MI300X and MI350X chips, which like Nvidia's Hopper and Blackwell command significantly higher prices. It's not doing the same AI volume as Nvidia, but it has said in the past that the MI product lines and CDNA series have been one of its fastest sales ramps ever. Should it make more data center chips that sell for $10,000 or more, or make more consumer chips that sell for $600 or less?
At the same time, AMD wants to increase its share of the GPU market. It has a far smaller total share than Nvidia, and that share has been trending downward. Intel is also trying to gain market share with its Arc GPUs. So, we could see both companies sacrifice some profit margins to increase their GPU share.
At MSRP, the RX 9070 XT represents an awesome value and a great card in general. Performance is higher than the previous generation RX 7900 XT, pretty much across the board, with a nominal price of $599. If it sells at that price, in quantity, this is about as good as we can expect from the graphics card market right now. Based on that, we've scored it 4.5 stars. Obviously, if prices increase substantially, the desirability of the cards will change.
RX 9070 XT, on paper, delivers a knockout blow to the RTX 5070. More VRAM, up to 25% higher performance, competitive RT, all for just $50 more? What's not to love? Well, as we said, actual retail availability is still unknown and could end up being just as horrible as the RTX 50-series launches so far.
The RX 9070 isn't quite as impressive. Yes, it's faster than the RTX 5070, but not by that much. It also offers more VRAM than the 5070, but conversely, Nvidia offers better software and features. FSR 4 might make AMD more competitive, but DLSS is in far more games than FSR. It ends up being pretty much a wash in our book, with real prices being the determining factor.
We're primarily talking about the 9070 XT today, even though we've shown all the 9070 results, so the 4.5-star score doesn't apply to the vanilla card. Unless supply ends up being far better than we're expecting, we're tentatively giving it the same 3.5-star score as the RTX 5070, perhaps a 4.0-star — because it's not that much slower than the XT, it has the same amount of VRAM, and it uses 80W or so less power. We'll finalize that score in a separate review in the coming days, and it could get bumped up half a point based on what happens with the launch tomorrow.
Ultimately, while the performance, on-paper specs, and pricing look great on many of the new GPUs, the actual prices will end up mattering most. And if you're hoping to buy a new graphics card right now, you really don't have many other options. It's not like there are a bunch of previous-generation cards still taking up retail space that need to be cleared out.
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