Radeon RX 9070 RDNA 4 GPU purportedly performs similar to RTX 4080 Super in CoD Black Ops 6

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The RX 9070 isn't even the top-end GPU in AMD's RDNA 4 lineup

AMD RDNA 4 at CES 2025
(Image credit: AMD)

IGN had a brief amount of time to benchmark AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 9070 RDNA 4 GPU at CES 2025. The outlet discovered that the new mid-range GPU performed similarly to an RTX 4080 Super, at least in Call of Duty Black Ops 6.

The GPU was housed in a demo booth at CES with Black Ops 6 loaded up and paired to a Ryzen 9 9950X3D-equipped gaming PC. IGN ran the game's built-in benchmark at 4K Extreme settings at native resolution; no upscale such as FSR 3, FSR 4, or XeSS were used. The GPU was also purportedly running on "very early alpha drivers," which resulted in some graphical bugs.

IGN Black Ops 6 RX 9070 Benchmark

(Image credit: IGN)

The RX 9070 output an average frame rate of 99 FPS, and a 1% low of 60 FPS. The bottleneck meter showed the GPU being "100%" of the bottleneck, which lets us know that the GPU was being fully utilized and not held back by the CPU (which is expected from Zen 5 class hardware armed with 3D-VCache).

Quick "napkin math" from IGN purports that the RX 9070's performance roughly sits in line with the RTX 4080 Super, which, according to their testing, gets around 129 FPS at the same graphics preset at 4K resolution (but with DLSS Quality enabled). According to IGN, Quality mode DLSS adds about a "30%" performance improvement, so a 30% reduction from 129 FPS equates to performance that is close to, if not slightly worse than, the RX 9070.

Of course, take this information with a huge grain of salt, but IGN's quick benchmark suggests that the RX 9070 will be around RTX 4080/4080 Super performance. How this plays out in other games, with fully baked drivers, and with other reviewers remains to be seen.

The in-game benchmark also revealed the RX 9070's VRAM amount, confirming rumors that the GPU will come with 16GB of VRAM. However, we don't know if the VRAM is GDDR6/GDDR6X or GDDR7.

The RX 9070 is the runner-up to the RX 9070 XT, which will be AMD's flagship GPU, at least for the initial RDNA 4 RX 9000 series launch. The new GPUs operate on AMD's all-new RDNA 4 architecture, which is based on TSMC's 4nm process node, featuring 2nd Gen AI accelerators, 3rd Gen ray tracing accelerators, and a 2nd Gen AMD radiance display engine. The GPUs will also launch alongside FSR 4, which will be AMD's first machine learning-based upscaler, similar to DLSS and XeSS. The RX 9070 and 9070 XT launch Q1 2025.

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Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

18 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Notton
    On paper, the 5080 has about 11% more CUDA cores than 4080 Super.
    The RT cores is 84 vs. 80.
    We'll just have to wait and see how much heavy lifting the rest of the parts do in games that don't support triple frame gen.
    Reply
  • Jagar123
    I think Daniel Owen debunked this pretty convincingly. He believes the COD6 graphics settings were changed without rebooting the game. In his experience if you do not reboot the game after making graphic setting changes they do not take effect.

    Radeon RX 9070 Gaming Benchmark at CES Analysis
    Reply
  • ekio
    AMD need to sell their gpu at such a deal price that everyone wants one, and so they can increase their market share, and become relevant.

    What’s the point to be struggling behind nvidia technically and regarding the hype and try to sell at a similar price range?
    Nobody will pick their products.

    Make your product dirt cheap so that people WANT it because it’s attractive, and provide people a kind of revenge against Nvidia. Otherwise it’s fighting for nothing.
    Reply
  • Eximo
    Purchasing power vs fab time. They don't have the capital to outbid Nvidia or Apple. So even if they sold at firesale prices, they wouldn't be able to make the volume to meet demand at those prices.
    Reply
  • A Stoner
    I certainly hope that AMD can bring forth some reasonable mid range quality. I understand they are not aiming for the top tier with their current plans. But staying in the ball park will still help with some level of competition. Competition is going to be needed in order to pair back the extreme cost growth at the high end at some point in time. $2000 for a consumer graphics card is hard to swallow.
    Reply
  • redgarl
    It is a game that is favorable to AMD, so no surprise here. It is basically having the same performances as the 7900XT, so expect a 7900XT as AMD described. If they can bring this at 450$, they will have a winner. Not to mention the 7900XT already had similar RT performance than the 4070 TI beside in AW2, CP2077 and Wukong...

    https://tpucdn.com/review/call-of-duty-black-ops-6-fps-performance-benchmark/images/performance-3840-2160.png
    Reply
  • redgarl
    Jagar123 said:
    I think Daniel Owen debunked this pretty convincingly. He believes the COD6 graphics settings were changed without rebooting the game. In his experience if you do not reboot the game after making graphic setting changes they do not take effect.

    Radeon RX 9070 Gaming Benchmark at CES Analysis
    You listening to that fool and propagating his speculation is already a joke in itself...
    Reply
  • OllyR
    The in-game benchmark also revealed the RX 9070's VRAM amount, confirming rumors that the GPU will come with 16GB of VRAM. However, we don't know if the VRAM is GDDR6/GDDR6X or GDDR7.

    The RX 9070 is the runner-up to the RX 9070 XT, which will be AMD's flagship GPU, at least for the initial RDNA 4 RX 9000 series launch
    At this point any possibility must be taken into consideration. Why it couldn't be that AMD sandboxed the launch of RDNA4? It seems so for sure. It could also be much better performing than expected. It would also make sense generation after generation that the 9070 could have similar performance to the 4080 Super. To try to surprise NVIDIA this was the only right tactic to follow, sandbox till the last minute.

    Also it seems that NVIDIA's 50 series is about 30% better performing than the 40 series (with 30% more watt consumption...) and this also makes sense given that the basic architecture has remained the same as the previous generation. This helps AMD a lot in staying competitive. This generation we have NVIDIA that only updated their previous architecture vs AMD that did the same. The next generation will be new projects and nodes for both but this is another story and we will see.

    We know that the RDNA3 project had been plagued by some problems in chiplet handling and so the maximum achievable frequency. Maybe with RDNA4 they have fixed these issues and for sure improved RT, they have added their first AI scalers and probably improved something else too. Don't forget that in the meantime AMD has worked with console manufacturers for the next gen so I think it will improve a lot (as was already rumored) on this aspect.

    Also we don't even know for sure if RAM on these cards is actually GDDR6 or GDDR7. Maybe it's GDDR7 who knows, maybe a model superior to the 9070XT also surprisingly popped up?
    Keep in mind that to date AMD has never "officially" presented RDNA4. There is nothing published on their site and even if it was like NVIDIA does with later added new models on the lineup even AMD could do the same. I'm not saying it will definitely be like this and there are a lot of "maybe" but at least waiting seems like the most logical thing to me. I repeat to you the only tactic to surprise NVIDIA was this and so...
    Reply
  • fybyfyby
    Of this is for good price, I will buy it.
    Reply
  • DavidLejdar
    If the RX 9070 has a geomean of around 90 FPS at 4K (no FSR), that's where I'd say that it starts to get interesting about adding a 4K screen for gaming, in particular if the RX 9070 comes at around a quarter of the price of RTX 5090. Naturally, the number may decrease with newer games. But for a range of genres, quite solid I'd say, let alone at below 4K. But we shall see. Personally, I'll likely eye something a tier above the RX 9070.
    Reply