Geekbench leaks has offered us a glimpse of what to expect from AMD's upcoming RX 9070 series GPUs (via Benchleaks at X). These test scores were probably inadvertently made public by an unsuspecting reviewer. In any case, while we don't want to jump to conclusions, and neither should you, the numbers are disappointing considering everything we've heard thus far. The flagship RX 9070 XT barely matches Nvidia's RTX 4070 Super. However, we cannot confirm the authenticity of these tests. Also, given the architectural revamps with RDNA 4, synthetic tests are not guaranteed to reflect how these GPUs will hold up in real-world performance.
Two separate test benches were used for the RX 9070 XT and its non-XT counterpart. The former is equipped with AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D on the Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard. The latter sticks with the standard Ryzen 7 9700X coupled with the MSI B650 Gaming Plus Wi-Fi motherboard. The setups are pretty different, so it's obvious the tests weren't conducted by a single person.
Geekbench was also generous enough to unofficially confirm previously rumored specifications. From the listings, the RX 9070 XT and 9070 non-XT share a similar 16GB VRAM configuration. The only difference is in the core counts; the 9070 XT has 64 CUs (Compute Units) while the 9070 offers 56 CUs. For the sake of comparison, we've aggregated publicly available data across the Vulkan and OpenCL APIs at Geekbench.
Jumping into the benchmarks, the RX 9070 XT scored 177,395 and 179,178 points in Vulkan and OpenCL, dropping to 158,520 and 140,842 points for the 9070 respectively. The RX 9070 XT, per this test, is 22% slower than Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti and that's quite telling. Jumping over to Ada, the RTX 4070 Super is a more suitable match. As expected, the 9070 XT isn't quite able to topple the RDNA 3 flagship but manages a somewhat decent 28% uplift against its predecessor, the RX 7800 XT.
GPU | Vulkan | OpenCL | vs 9070 XT in Vulkan | vs 9070 XT in OpenCL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
RX 9070 XT (Leaked) | 177395 | 179178 | 100.00% | 100.00% |
RX 9070 (Leaked) | 158520 | 140842 | 89.36% | 78.60% |
RX 7900 XTX | 235279 | 212081 | 132.63% | 118.36% |
RX 7900 XT | 206494 | 186399 | 116.40% | 104.03% |
RX 7800 XT | 155488 | 139983 | 87.65% | 78.13% |
RTX 5070 Ti | 228576 | 229140 | 128.85% | 127.88% |
RTX 4070 Super | 178982 | 192378 | 100.89% | 107.37% |
We can compare synthetics all day long, but at the end of the day, proper real-world tests are what truly matter. Back in January, a tipster alleged raster performance in the ballpark of an RTX 4080 Super, so it's possible that RDNA 4 doesn't perform as well in theoretical tests, but that's just a guess. If the RTX 5070 is around 15% faster than the RTX 4070; typical for Blackwell GPUs, that'd land it in RTX 4070 Super territory. This doesn't leave much wiggle room for AMD, but we'll get a clearer picture after its presentation on February 28.
