Despite the ongoing memory shortage, AMD is going against the grain and reportedly developing a new entry-level RDNA 4 graphics card to compete with the RTX 5050: Videocardz reports that AMD is cooking up an RX 9050 graphics card based on the Navi 44 die.

Despite the name, the reported specs of the RX 9050 are very similar to the RX 9060 XT 8GB rather than the vanilla RX 9060. In fact, the RX 9050’s specs are so similar to its XT counterpart that the GPU has more cores than the vanilla RX 9060. Videocard’s report claims the RX 9050 will come with 2048 cores with a game clock of up to 1,920 MHz and a boost clock of up to 2,600 MHz. Memory is comprised of 8GB of GDDR6 operating at 18Gbps across a 128-bit bus. The GPU is also reported to come with a PCIe 5.0 x16 interface, two DisplayPort 2.1a ports, and one HDMI 2.1b port.

For the uninitiated, the RX 9060 XT 8GB also features 2048 cores, 8GB of memory, and a 128-bit memory bus. Where the two GPUs differ is in clock speeds — the RX 9060 XT has a 24% clock speed advantage over the RX 9050, featuring a boost frequency of up to 3.1 GHz. Memory bandwidth is also slightly higher thanks to the inclusion of 20 Gbps GDDR6 modules. There’s no word yet on the RX 9050’s target board power, but the recommended power supply requirements for the RX 9060 XT 8GB suggest it will consume more power than the RX 9050.

*Specs unconfirmed by AMD

The RX 9050’s unorthodox specifications (in reference to its nomenclature) suggest AMD wants a better SKU to compete against the RTX 5050, specifically one more powerful than the vanilla RX 9060. If this weren’t the case, AMD could easily have repurposed its existing vanilla RX 9060 to serve both the OEM and DIY markets instead of creating a new SKU (the RX 9060 is currently OEM-exclusive). We have seen a report of the RX 9060 outperforming the RTX 5050 by 20%, but that's only one test. As usual, if the GPU does exist, we'll need to wait for third-party testing before drawing any conclusions.

Pricing is still unknown as well, but it is likely that AMD will target the RTX 5050’s street pricing with the RX 9050. The cheapest RTX 5050 at the time of writing is $289.

If AMD has a new GPU to announce, we'll likely hear about it at Computex 2026, which kicks off in Taipei in just a few weeks. AMD won't have a Computex keynote this year, breaking with its usual live event schedule, but AMD's AIB partners will undoubtedly be ready to show off RX 9050 models if the GPU is indeed real.

The latest Steam Hardware Survey is out, and an AMD RDNA4 architecture GPU has charted in the PC Video Card Usage tables. Despite AMD’s fanfared deprioritization of flagship GPUs to follow the mass market, the Radeon RX 9000 family's entry into the chart has been a long time coming. Moreover, the RDNA4 Radeon has appeared with more of a whimper than a bang, turning up with just a 0.16% market share, still less than Nvidia's 2014 GeForce GT 730.

Your eyes don’t deceive – AMD’s only Steam Hardware Survey (SHWS) charted card is the RX 9070 non-XT. Does this show that AMD’s cheaper, slightly lower-tier model may be a sleeper hit for its amazing efficiency? I have a plain vanilla RX 9070 in my personal desktop, and am very pleased with its quiet, cool performance, so praise of this SKU might show a little bias.

Interestingly, though, AMD’s RX 9070 XT did indeed hit the SHWS in the December 2025 data, at 0.22%. It has now disappeared from view (under the 0.15% threshold for charting).

It has been approaching a year since the first RX 9000 graphics cards became available. We reviewed the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 back in early March 2025. These 16GB VRAM cards were praised for strong mainstream performance at good MSRPs, with worthwhile improvements in AI and ray tracing performance. AMD released its RX 9060 XT (8 and 16GB VRAM) models in June last year, and also saw largely positive feedback (for the 16GB version, anyway).

It is worth repeating that, despite AMD’s mass market strategy and general positivity in reviews and on discussion forums, people are still buying into the GeForce ecosystem by default.

While we are kind of celebrating the first RDNA4 card charting in the Steam usage database with its 0.16% placing, the last-gen RTX 4060 gained 0.46% share. Moreover, the biggest gainer of the month was, predictably, the RTX 5060 with an increase of 0.72% in market share. If we sort the chart by gains in the last month, the RX 9070 rises from near the bottom of the chart to 6^th place. Which isn’t so bad.

16GB VRAM adoption spurt

Another change that seems remarkable in the last month is the observed increase in Steam gamers backing GPUs with 16GB of VRAM. As per the numbers shown, those gaming on 16GB GPUs went up an impressive 5.85% in January 2026. Meanwhile, 12GB VRAM became 4.01% less prevalent, and 8GB VRAM, 3.11% less common.

So, 16GB of VRAM looks set to move into second place in the graphics card memory charts, as early as February’s results. Unless there is another inflection or bump in the trends...

Last but not least, please remember that the SHWS figures aren’t definitive, as the disappearance of the RX 9070 XT shows. They are just an indicator of trends among active Steam gamers, snapshotted that month. Sometimes big events in the Steam marketplace, like a country being added to the survey, can nudge the results more than usual, and the way the charts are compiled is quite opaque. Other factors, like seasonality and big game releases, can also impact the data.

After AMD's keynote at CES 2026, we were invited to a roundtable discussion at the show with AMD in Las Vegas, Nevada, covering their latest graphics technologies, like FSR Redstone and more. Some highlights include insight into why AMD chose not to put RDNA 4 graphics in its AI400 mobile chips, the open sourcing of FSR, and much more.

Before getting stuck into the press Q&A, be sure to check out our previous coverage on AMD's announcements at the show, including Redstone on RDNA 3, hinting at open sourcing FSR 4, and the company's overall announcements they made at their keynote last week.

With all of that out of the way, please note that some elements of the transcript have been lightly edited for flow and clarity, and we have also identified certain speakers when they were made known. While recording in a noisy, ambient environment, some things can get lost in the audio mix we've denoted as such in the copy.

Josh Hort (AMD): So here, we're at the FSR Redstone Roundtable; my name is Josh Hort. I'm Senior Director here at AMD in the Computing and Graphics group, so I work underneath Jack Huynh. You've probably heard that name before. I lead ISV enablement. So what does that mean? It means everything from AI PC software enabling, to building that ecosystem up, to all the game engineering and integration of FSR technologies, to benchmark optimizations and benchmark engineering.

So my team is responsible for working with the ULs and Primate Labs of the world to make sure we get the scores that we do on the products that we deliver, and we're also responsible for developer programs for GPUOpen; well, that's the website that my team manages, as well as hardware seeding to developers and other key parties and partners. So that's me in a nutshell. I've been at AMD about seven and a half years; you can find this on LinkedIn. Before that, I worked at Intel for 17.

I don't know how much you guys are aware of Redstone. I can go really fast through this, or I can go really slow. If all you guys know all this stuff, we can just blow through it, because it's really just a recap of what happened on December 10.

Journalist 1: Yeah, I know it. I think we all do.

Other Journalists: [chorus of acknowledgment]

Josh Hort (AMD): If you know what was released; we have over 200 titles that we delivered in 2025, which is — I do have to pause though, because the amount of progress that we made in 2025 is phenomenal. I mean, from the outside looking in, I hope you guys see it the same way, because when we launched at the end of February, we had, what, thirty? Thirty-two titles, 33 or something. I'll tell you internally, I told my team: by Computex, let's have a stretch goal of 100 titles, and they blew that number way out of the park. So it's just fantastic, the amount of reception we've had?

And I think — combined with putting it on GPUOpen, which has really also increased the uptake. Because we can't be everything to everyone. [...] We can't cover the whole sphere of developers that are out there, right? So putting the code out on GPUOpen has also leveraged some uptake that we weren't even anticipating. So it's working, I guess, long story short, right? If you look at FSR 1 / 2 / 3 support, it's 500-plus [games]; Redstone, it's 200-plus. And you guys are aware that Redstone is for the 9000 series cards. Okay, so if there aren't any questions, I can just stop [...], and you guys can ask away. We don't need any slides. Sure.

Journalist 2: Multi-frame generation.

Josh Hort (AMD): Multi-frame? I can't comment on future plans. I can say absolutely we're looking at it. I think in general, we need to get the right things right first, and multi-frame gen, of course, introduces latency. And so how do you combat that? We have technologies like Anti-Lag, but we have to marry those two technologies together so that you can improve the latency the best as possible.

Journalist 3: So I think a more rounded question is, do you do you see a demand for a multi frame gen? I know when I go to play a game, I rarely find myself going above 2x frame gen.

Josh Hort (AMD): It's always in the eye of the beholder, right?

Journalist 3: Sure.

Josh Hort (AMD): Some people are more tolerant to latency. Some games like, Twitch games, FPS games; it's not really appropriate, but if you're playing something casual, usually on the casual side, it also has less demands on the GPU, so you don't need it; your frame rate is already high enough, right? And if you're a casual gamer, you're not trying to get to 240 FPS. So is there a place for it? [noise of uncertainty] Like I said, we're looking at it, but we don't have any product announcements to make at this time.

Josh Hort (AMD): How are you? I'm Josh. Dean? Pleasure.

"Dean": Will I get better at 240 FPS?

Josh Hort (AMD): Will you get better at 240? I dunno. If you've got the golden eye, maybe. eSports games, sure, right?

AMD Representative: For that, you've just gotta get really close to the monitor, and turn it to 240.

Josh Hort (AMD): I know eSports guys that can see to the pixel at 240 Hz. Some of these people, even if they see one pixel change — and they can see that. Okay. I dunno about you guys, but my vision's getting a lot worse. [chuckles]

Journalist 4: So what about support for RDNA 3.5? Because there was an announcement yesterday, the new mobile Ryzen AI 400 series [...] a new stack, but they don't get new [...] performance.

Josh Hort (AMD): I feel like the question's been answered already, so I don't have much — anything more to add. I'd say that we're always evaluating the roadmap, and we have to make the right priority call. [...] I will say in general that we have a lot of products out there, and it's a lot of support. It's not just hey, "I took some leaked source code, and I put it on the internet, and it works." That's not how you make a product.

Journalist 3: I don't want to monopolize this conversation, so if anyone else—

Josh Hort (AMD): No. I mean, you guys, feel free to riff off each other, right? Let's make it a natural conversation.

Journalist 3: I had a question on handhelds. Right now, AMD's hardware is dominant in the handheld space, but there's a—

Josh Hort (AMD): Another player that's out there that's pretty small but substantial.

Journalist 3: Yes.

Josh Hort (AMD): And I love 'em by the way.

Journalist 3: Right now, the feature support is there [...] on the Windows handhelds, but there's kind of this disparate integration; there's features like RSR and FMF to be brought to the forefront to that kind of handheld experience. I'm wondering how you're engaged with OEMs to ensure that those features are brought to the forefront so that's easy for players.

Josh Hort (AMD): It's a different team from mine that works with the OEMs, so I can't really speak from any first-hand knowledge, but nothing would prevent them from bringing the Adrenalin driver to the device, and then getting the analytical-based FMF or upscaling as wel.

Journalist 3: So would you be engaged with Valve on the SteamOS side of things, or Lenovo?

Josh Hort (AMD): Yeah, I can't comment on the specifics, right? But absolutely; our partnership with Valve is deeply important to us, and those kinds of features are important to them as well. But I don't have any announcements, [or] feature sets to talk about.

Journalist 3: Okay. So, without going into announcements, is the interest there from — SteamOS is becoming an increasingly popular destination for handhelds; is there interest in those types of features? Is it something that you're discussing?

Josh Hort (AMD): We're absolutely investigating it with them, yes. But again, I can't speak for Valve, or what their intentions are.

Journalist 3: And this is, I guess, a broader Linux question, because the Adrenalin support in Linux is not really there.

Josh Hort (AMD): Well, RADV has really taken off, and a lot of it is _because_ of Valve. Have you seen the amount of contributions they've made to the driver? It's phenomenal. And that's not to say that the [AMDGPU-PRO] driver has gone away, but there's just fewer releases, and they're very targeted releases. But RADV is meant to be the main open-source driver going forwards.

Journalist 3: I'm aware that OEMs can tap in to any feature within Adrenalin; I'm moreso curious if there's any engagement from AMD on that side, because — of course, I understand that, but when I'm going to pick up a handheld, and there's the Lenovo one, there's the MSI one, and there's the ASUS one, and I want the Ryzen Z2 Extreme, and it doesn't have the features that I'm expecting that are easily accessible, it doesn't create the best user experience.

Josh Hort (AMD): Well, FSR and frame gen are on the ROG Ally X, right? And the ROG Ally.

Journalist 3: ASUS has done a good job with it. Moreso than Lenovo and MSI.

Josh Hort (AMD): I see; so that's more what your question is targeted at. I mean, I can't speak on behalf of them, and what they chose for their products is their decision, but the technology exists and it works, right? The Xbox devices do support the analytical frame-gen and upscaling. And actually you can get really good framerates on some games that are very challenging.

Journalist 5: I hacked Lossless Scaling onto my Steam Deck for that exact reason. Hey man, if I had AFMF on my Steam Deck and I didn't need to do that, that would be great.

[some discussion of Samsung's new 1,040 Hz Odyssey 3D 6K monitor]

Josh Hort (AMD): Well, you gotta remember that means you have to make 1,040 frames per second on the GPU side. Which is going to eat into your performance. Your frametime is sub-millisecond. You're rendering not a lot of geometry at that point.

AMD Representative: If you had the choice, then, would you rather be at 240 or that brand-new 1040 Hz monitor?

Josh Hort (AMD): Personally — this is just my personal — this is not an AMD-based opinion — [...] Everybody's trying to push technology to the limits. I'd much rather get 4x the frametime to get 4x the amount of pixels and quality pixels into it, than running it at some ridiculous framerate. And the ML techniques can improve that, right, like MFG, multi-frame gen? Sure, absolutely. But if you're doing 6x, 8x, 32x frame gen? The latency falls apart. Your mind is very quickly going to realize that—

Journalist 3: Even 4x is pretty rough.

Josh Hort (AMD): Yes.

Journalist 3: So Redstone was kinda this big moment for, for the most part, feature parity with — short of MFG, which I think is a question of value to a lot of people — this level of feature parity and pushing toward what NVIDIA would call Neural Rendering. You're not announcing any products, not doing anything like that, but I'm wondering: are there more applications of AI and machine learning in rendering? And where do you see it having more applications outside of upscaling and frame generation?

Josh Hort (AMD): The easiest place — because when we talk about internally, some people just synonymize it with gaming, and I have to stop them and say "no, time out." In workstation, there's a lot of CAD/CAM applications, that whole segment, from Blender, to Autodesk applications, etc etc; you guys know them all. [Those applications] lend themselves very well to not only upscaling and frame gen, but also things like ray-trace denoising, like ray generation, and even neural radiance caching; the more advanced things we've been bringing towards the ray-tracing [and] path-tracing acceleration. So yeah, the first step is — and actually, we are working with ISVs in bringing FSR to their applications. NVIDIA already does this; the competition already does this, so it's just a natural progression. Did that address your question, or was there another part of it?

Journalist 3: I guess what I'm saying is, for me, when I hear about — obviously, frame generation, and upscaling, those make sense, but then I hear about ray regeneration, about neural radiance cache, and as someone consumes this content, and doesn't make it, these are applications of machine learning that I hadn't realized, and they can make a really significant difference. And so I'm saying, from your perspective, what are those other applications for machine learning in the rendering pipeline?

Josh Hort (AMD): I see; so like "what other things could we do?"

Journalist 3: Yeah.

Josh Hort (AMD): Well, there's certainly ReSTIR, which is reservoir sampling; I'm trying to think of what else there is. There's neural intersection functions, what we call NIF, with importance; basically, when you're doing ray tracing, you're looking for those intersections where the ray intersects with a certain volume, and if you can create a neural method to figure out which rays are important and where they're going to intersect, you can accelerate not having to go through the BVH tree traversal, which is a very expensive thing. So the less BVH traversals you have to do, the faster your ray-tracing and path-tracing is going to be. And really, your path tracing is what, just multi-bounce ray-tracing, right?

So we can actually get to the path-tracing era, because there really aren't hardly any titles out there that support path tracing, because you need a very expensive graphics card in order to run it. So that's what ML is going to bring is really democratize, bring it more to the masses, right? I think Lisa said it best, yesterday — AI everywhere, for everyone, right? We really believe the same thing, and with FSR Redstone, and what's coming next, and so on and so forth is — yeah, we want to bring this to the masses. And it's really the functions and the features that we think are going to be useful, versus just some candy or powerpoint where it doesn't have ISV uptake, developer uptake.

Journalist 5: Will there ever be support for Redstone on RDNA 3?

Josh Hort (AMD): [group laughing] Haha, he asked the same question. [Journalist 4 above]

Journalist 6: I got to play today with Panther Lake with multi-frame generation. It was pretty good for a very sleek and mobile device. Ryzen AI 400 is coming not only to the notebook and [unintelligible] and also for the desktop part, so there will be small desktop PC with Ryzen AI 400, and you get a pretty good experience on a big screen; you have a small tiny box over there, with good frame generation, so, it is ... the way to go, I guess.

AMD Representative: That's kind of a hardware question, right? It's kind of hard for Josh to answer.

Journalist 6: Yes, sure, but —

AMD Representative: Your real question is "why isn't it RDNA 4 in Ryzen AI 400," right?

Journalist 6: No, that's [laughing] no, that's really another question — that's a BIG question.

Josh Hort (AMD): That one was a product decision, right? And I'm not the product decision-maker.

Journalist 6: Ryzen AI 400 is also a refresh of the 300 series, I get that. Maybe in the next version we will see RDNA 4 or something like that. [...] I think the market is big, especially for the notebooks, and the tiny desktops.

Josh Hort (AMD): The demand is out there, is what you're saying.

Journalist 6: Yes.

Journalist 3: I'll tell you what I would like to see. [Journalist 5] mentioned Lossless Scaling ealier; when AFMF first came out, I was expecting there to be an approach by AMD to approach the developer of Lossless Scaling to bring that into the driver, and speaking of multi-frame gen, I think one of the applications for it that would make a lot of sense to me is in the driver, through AFMF, to scale up higher, which is obviously something Lossless Scaling can do to varying degrees of success. That is definitely something that I think could turn [points to small PCs] that, that, to — not a gaming machine necessarily, but —

Josh Hort (AMD): Capable of running something, yeah.

Journalist 3: And obviously you guys have made a lot of strides with ISV engagement, we mentioned FSR3 earlier, but you can't engage everyone, it's not possible, and that driver-level solution for me has been really great.

Josh Hort (AMD): It's definitely something we're investigating closely, how we can bring more of the technology to the driver so it doesn't have to be what I call "enlightened," which means like, in-engine, in-game, versus "unenlightened," where the driver takes care of it. And yes, we are definitely investigating — again, no product plans, no announcements today — but absolutely we're looking at how we can bring some more ML tech to the driver level. It makes it easier to distribute, it gives you backward compatibility with games that will never get updated ever again. The publisher might not even exist anymore.

Journalist 7: [Andrej Zdravkovic, AMD SVP of GPU Technologies] mentioned that the plan was to still open-source FSR4, and I wanted to confirm that with you after, obviously, the source code came out in August I think it was? That's still the plan, to open-source—

Josh Hort (AMD): Each of the technologies will be on their own trajectory for open-sourcing. I don't make the decisions or do the open-sourcing; my team executes it, like puts it on the website. But it's a strategic discussion on what gets open sourced and what doesn't. If Andrej told you we're gonna open source it, then — well —

Journalist 7: [laughing] You won't dispute that claim?

Josh Hort (AMD): Now, [as for] when? I can't say when. Obviously, we try to be as open as we possibly can without giving away the farm. Because we want proliferation of the technology, right? There's partners who come out of the woodwork that could be competitors of ours, who also want to be partners on things like this because it's just good for the ecosystem. FSR was picked up by Microsoft for their AutoSR implementation, for instance, and the main reason why they picked it is because it was open. Open source is good for everybody. [Note: this is incorrect as far as we know; AutoSR is ML-based and uses a custom CNN.]

Journalist 8: You made a comment that we've made a lot of progress with ISVs [...] if your team was in charge of this, was there like a change in strategy, or more of a focus? How did you get from point A to point B, where you got like 200 games in a couple months?

Josh Hort (AMD): I think I kind of hinted at it, right? I think putting it out on GPUOpen, we hit critical mass. I think it was a flywheel where the game publishers saw "OK, this tech actually works pretty well," and the Digital Foundry review came out, they did the pixel peeping and were like, "Wow! This is pretty fantastic." It was a glowing review, which was great for us, right? But it puts us on the map where like, OK, the technology's at a point where it's mature, it's ready to go, and my team put in a lot of effort in the ISV enabling portion, but also like I said, putting it on GPUOpen so that anybody can pick it up I think also really helped propel us way faster than we could do with just the people power that we have.

Journalist 8: Following up on the change in strategies, when you're approaching ISVs for integration, particularly in games, outside of budget and time constraints, do you hear anything else from developers concerning their hesitation for adding features, especially the latest and greatest features?

Josh Hort (AMD): It depends on what piece of technology is getting inserted into the pipeline and where. If you look at things like super resolution, and frame generation, those are both post-processing steps at the end of the pipeline, so it's very easy to integrate them. Now, denoising, the ray regeneration portion, that can be more tricky, because some game engines have a fused denoiser where they want the denoise and the super-res step to happen at the same time; others want them completely separated because they're at different parts of the pipeline.

So when you have a fused denoiser, it provides performance, but it can't be used by all game engines, just because of the way they are written. On something like the neural radiance caching, that one is even more complex, because it needs a lot of different input information into the model to get the output, and the information might not be readily available in the format that's required by the model in order for it operate. It's also kind of intrusive into the pipeline. Long story short, it's harder to integrate.

Journalist 8: So, especially for those features, you're looking to engage developers before release as much as you can?

Josh Hort (AMD): Yeah, so like we did a lot of work with Fatshark, because they can move really fast, and they were embracing the technology; not necessarily "building the plane as we're flying it," but super cutting-edge, rapid iteration, super close, deep technical partnership. The amount of work we did in a small amount of time is phenomenal. But we have more work to do, and that's going to be a focus in 2026, is getting that Neural Radiance Caching feature — not only getting it into more titles, but also improving on the integration, the API and whatnot, so as we get more feedback from our ISV partners, we'll be improving it across the way in 2026 and beyond.

Journalist 1: How's Redstone been with VR? Any issues with ghosting, or?

Josh Hort (AMD): With VR? I haven't tried it personally; I don't have a VR headset — I used to. But in my copious spare time, it was collecting dust, unfortunately. I haven't heard it first-hand of any issues. I would say frame gen in general might be a problem? Because I know from past experience that latency is so critical to avoiding nausea. If your brain can perceive one frame that's behind it immediately gets sick, you're done. Some people don't notice it, but a lot of people do, and that's why they get sick. And if you think about it, frame gen today is, you're taking a past frame and the current frame and inserting another one, so you have to hold a frame. You're naturally introducing that latency?

By default, you've already just voided the benefit there, because you're going to get sick. Now super res, sure! It's a fantastic technology. It's almost a requirement, because you want to get to 240 Hz. Like, he was talking about 1040 Hz, in a VR headset 1040 Hz actually might be pretty cool. High-speed, super realistic — but again, you're cutting your frame time down, your rende time, to one millisecond or something, depending on what your resolution is and whatnot, so you're not going to be able to do a lot of high-quality features.

[Session ends with off-topic VR game discussion.]

AMD released FSR4 Redstone a couple of weeks back, finally giving Team Red a frame generation technology that could go toe-to-toe with Nvidia’s DLSS. However, much like its rival, AMD decided to limit it to RDNA 4, so only gamers with RX 9000-series GPUs can take advantage of the new features that arrive with the latest drivers from the company. Reddit user u/AthleteDependent926 is not having this, though, as they created a workaround that allowed older RDNA 3 GPUs to take advantage of the tech.

According to the Redditor, this technique only works with RDNA 3 hardware and Linux operating systems. Aside from this, you need to install Valve’s Proton compatibility layer to make it work properly. But after you follow all the steps correctly, you should be able to enjoy machine-learning-powered neural radiance caching and ray regeneration even on older Radeon RX 7000-series GPUs. These features complement the already existing AI upscale and frame generation that dropped with FSR4, which was also limited to AMD’s latest graphics cards.

Incidentally, the company accidentally leaked the entire source code for FSR4 in August 2025, which allowed modders to reverse engineer the technology and make it compatible with RDNA 2 cards. Both the FSR4/RDNA 2 and FSR4/RDNA 3 mods allowed older hardware to enjoy these new features, but at a much higher performance cost. According to u/AthleteDependent926, FSR4 Redstone is much more demanding than FSR3, with the latency on their AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT at 0.13ms — almost double the reported 0.07ms achieved with the older frame gen tech, but still at an acceptable level.

Some gamers were livid when they discovered that RDNA 3 could run FSR4 Redstone, saying that AMD is no different from Nvidia for artificially limiting the performance of its older hardware. However, others were quick to point out that AMD could only be doing this to help boost the sales of its current Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs, and that once the sales of these graphics cards start to taper, they’re hoping that Team Red would eventually officially release it for older models that can still run it reliably.

AMD’s latest Radeon driver update (Adrenalin Edition 25.9.1) is expanding support for FSR 4 upscaling and frame generation. According to the official patch notes, FSR 4 can now be enabled in most DirectX 12 titles that already support FSR 3.1. With the latest update, FSR 4 is now compatible with 85 games in total, however it is still limited to RDNA 4-based Radeon 9000 series GPUs.

In a separate announcement post, AMD has explained how this works and notes that enabling FSR 4 through its new driver update is a pretty seamless process. Once users update to the latest Adrenalin Edition driver, their Radeon RX 9000 Series graphics cards should automatically gain access to FSR 4. Additionally, users need to switch to FSR 3.1 in their supported game settings and then toggle FSR 4 within AMD”s Adrenalin Edition software. This enables the driver to override the in-game FSR 3.1 implementation with the newer FSR 4 version.

The company has also made it clear that this works only with DirectX 12 titles that have integrated a signed FSR 3.1 DLL as per AMD’s developer guidelines. Any games running on Vulkan, or those that use non-standard methods such as third-party plug-ins, are not compatible with the FSR 4 driver upgrade.

Despite this update, AMD’s upscaling technology still trails Nvidia’s DLSS in terms of adoption and flexibility. In the meantime, community developers have stepped in with tools like OptiScaler, which can reroute existing upscalers such as DLSS, XeSS, or FSR 2 into FSR 4 with frame generation, effectively widening its reach. Similarly, certain GitHub users pointed out that FSR 3.1 games can be upgraded to FSR 4 by simply replacing the game's FSR 3.1 DLL files manually with DLL files from AMD's latest FSR SDK 2.0, although these unofficial solutions may have limitations.

Just last month, the company accidentally uploaded the full FSR 4 source code to GitHub while updating its FidelityFX SDK, revealing work on an alternate int8-based version of the upscaler. This suggests AMD might be preparing broader GPU support for FSR 4 beyond its current RDNA 4 hardware.

For now, AMD’s official rollout of FSR 4 ensures stability and broader compatibility for supported titles, but the modding community’s efforts suggest a strong demand for wider adoption.

AMD has added a graphics card called Radeon 9060 XL, that does not officially exist, into the list of products supported by its ROCm 6.4.2 software stack, noticed a VideoCardz reader. However, the Radeon 9060 XL may not be a name of a new product, but simply a typo on AMD's part.

AMD's list of products supported by the ROCm 6.4.2 software stack includes the company's latest Radeon RX 9070 XT, RX 9070, RX 9070 GRE, RX 9060 XT, and RX 9060 XL, but lacks the RX 9060 model. While the document correctly points the latest Radeon RX 9000-series graphics cards to the gfx1200 and gfx1201 processors (as LLVM targets for compilers), it for some reason attributes them to the RDNA 3 microarchitecture, which is incorrect as they belong to the RDNA 4 family of GPUs.

Given that the document incorrectly describes microarchitecture of AMD's latest Radeon RX 9000-series graphics processors, it may as well call the Radeon RX 9060 the Radeon RX 9060 XL - as the unit most likely carries the Navi 44 XL processor.

While ATI Technologies, which became AMD's graphics products group (after AMD acquired ATI in 2006), used the 'XL' moniker for select products (e.g., Radeon X1800XL in 2005 and for OEM-only versions), starting from the Radeon HD 3000 series onward (with models like HD 3770, HD 4870, HD 5970, HD 6970, R9 290X, RX 480, RX 7900 XTX, etc.), AMD abandoned the 'XL' branding, but retained the moniker to mark cut-down versions of its GPUs: for example, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE carries the Navi 31 XL processor.

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are designed in a way that their performance can be scaled up or down during the design phase, or even after tape-out. AMD's 9000-series, built on RDNA 4 (also known as Navi 4), is no exception. AMD confirmed this during one of its Hot Chips 2025 presentations, and demonstrated how it can cut down the design of its GPUs to produce more SKUs.

Building a product family using two GPU designs

All GPUs contain a massive number of similar components, including Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs), caches, special-purpose hardware units, controllers, and physical layers (PHYs). So, if a defect occurs during production, the faulty part could be disabled, and the processor may still function correctly. However, it does not mean total flexibility. Some units reuse transistors between them, and others rely on data paths that are integral to neighbouring components. AMD claims it has designed RDNA 4 to be more adaptable than its predecessors, thanks to a feature it calls asymmetric harvesting.

By selectively disabling components, adjustments can be made to memory systems and asymmetric resource allocation. This allows the company to produce higher-end, mid-tier, and specialized GPUs from the same base design, or even the same die.

By using this strategy, AMD spawned a smaller Navi 44 (Radeon RX 9060-series) out of the bigger Navi 48 (Radeon RX 9070-series) design by reducing the number of shader engines (SEs), Infinity cache, GDDR6 controllers, and PHYs, but leaving things like the command processor, display engines, media engines, security processor, and other specific things intact. By reusing photomasks from Navi 48, AMD saved on manufacturing costs. In addition to this, AMD built the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 GRE from the full-fat Radeon RX 9070 XT by disabling certain elements, which essentially increased yields and enabled them to hit pricing targets. Such an approach also shortened the relevant GPU's time-to-market, as fewer unique silicon designs required tape out, validation, and production.

Asymmetric harvesting

The most important element of this strategy is the way a Shader Engine (SE) can be harvested. An SE is a fundamental building block of the GPU, housing multiple Work Group Processors (WGPs), Compute Units (CUs), and fixed-function stages for geometry, rasterization, and rendering. On RDNA 4-based products, AMD allows entire shader engines to be disabled when defects are present or when a lower performance target is desired. In addition to this, AMD may disable specific WGPs, which provides a lot of additional flexibility.

Memory harvesting adds another dimension of flexibility. The RDNA 4 memory subsystem contains multiple GDDR6 controllers, linked through Infinity Fabric and cache structures. Each memory controller can be fused off individually, meaning that AMD can reduce the effective bus width in increments of 64 bits.

For instance, a flagship model such as the Radeon RX 9070 XT includes all four shader engines, each featuring 64 compute units (with 4096 stream processors that contain ALUs), and four 64-bit memory interfaces. Meanwhile, the lower-end Radeon 9700 GRE features only three SEs, resulting in 48 CUs and 3072 SPs, and three 64-bit memory arrays, resulting in a 192-bit memory interface.

In addition to whole shader engines, smaller harvesting steps are possible through the selective disabling of work group processors inside a shader engine. This fine control enables AMD to produce products with unusual compute unit counts, such as the 56 CU Radeon RX 9070. Using this method, the Radeon RX 9070 uses a certain number of CUs instead of the whole SE. But it also comes with all memory interfaces enabled, so the RX 9070 has a full-blown 256-bit memory bus.

The concept of asymmetric harvest extends further by enabling different ratios of compute to pixel resources, ensuring that products can be tailored to gaming workloads, multimedia tasks, or compute-centric usage without redesigning the core architecture or die.

For example, the Radeon RX 9070 XT maintains a full 256-bit interface with sixteen gigabytes of memory, while the RX 9070 GRE drops to 192-bit with twelve gigabytes. Mid-range models such as the RX 9060 variants shrink further to 128-bit buses, supporting either sixteen gigabytes or eight gigabytes, depending on the SKU. This granularity allows AMD to respond to memory pricing, availability, and positioning across markets while using the same baseline silicon.

At the SoC level, RDNA 4 integrates global L2 cache blocks, compression and decompression hardware, and Infinity Fabric links (operating at 1.5 GHz – 2.50 GHz depending on the load) in a modular fashion. Because these components can handle variable data flows regardless of how many SEs or memory channels remain active, the architecture sustains efficiency, even in harvested configurations.

Centralized compression saves bandwidth and power across workloads, with AMD reporting up to a 25% reduction in fabric traffic, and a claimed 15% uplift in certain rasterization scenarios. This design ensures that whether a die is partially disabled or fully enabled, the supporting infrastructure remains balanced throughout.

Security and reliability features are also embedded within the architecture, which makes the aforementioned flexible configuration possible. By providing robust error handling, AMD can confidently sell partially defective chips as lower-end SKUs without any compromises.

Commercial implications

The commercial implications of AMD's asymmetric harvesting approach are significant: so far, the company has built a line-up of seven products for desktop PCs and inference servers using just two processors: the Navi 48 and the Navi 44. In theory, AMD could add four or more RDNA 4 GPUs for notebooks to its line-up, if it were interested in competing in that market.

Update 6/6/2025 9:00 am ET: Jon Peddie has kindly provided us with comments regarding AMD's GPU business underperformance in Q1 2025. He believes that the sources of AMD's decline in GPU shipments lie in the company's failure to accurately predict demand for its GPU products six to nine months in advance, as well as the necessity to balance its TSMC allocations between Zen CPUs and Radeon GPUs. Read the exact comments below.

AMD's desktop GPU market share, based on sales into the market, has dropped to a historic low in the latest report from Jon Peddie Research, despite the company's launch of new products during the quarter. Discrete GPU shipments for desktop PCs increased significantly both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year in Q1 2025 and totaled 9.2 million units. However, as both AMD and Nvidia rolled out their new-generation graphics cards in the first quarter, Nvidia managed to sell millions of its new GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs and capture its highest market share, while AMD struggled to sell even 750,000 add-in-boards, which is why its share dropped to a historical low.

Nvidia now commands around 92% of the desktop discrete GPU market, while AMD's share declined to approximately 8%, the company's lowest share ever.

The industry shipped 9.2 million standalone graphics processing units for desktop PCs during the first quarter, up 8.5% compared to the prior quarter and by 5.3% on an annual basis. In terms of market share dynamics, Nvidia was the only major vendor to expand its position, gaining 8.5%. AMD’s share declined by 7.3%, while Intel's share saw a smaller contraction of 1.2%. 

AMD's GPU shipments totaled approximately 740,000 to 750,000 units, the company's worst results in three years. To make matters worse, for the first time in decades (if not ever), the quarterly sales of AMD GPUs declined despite the launch of new halo products. Jon Peddie, the head of Jon Peddie Research, believes the poor performance was a result of an AMD demand misprediction in Q1.

Nvidia sold around 8.46 million standalone graphics processors for desktops, the company's best result in three years, especially keeping in mind that the company sold quite expensive products ($379 - $1999) during the first quarter and these products happen to be some of the best graphics cards around. 

"AMD and Nvidia have to walk a tight rope wire when it comes to placing orders at fabs like TMSC — and you never get it right all the time," said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, in a conversation with Tom's Hardware. "Forecasting demand six to nine months in advance, when the economic and political environment is so unstable adds an additional layer of complexity. Then you have yield issues on top of it all, and of course you have to get the specs right. Nonetheless, AMD has been doing this for decades and knows all those tradeoffs, plus in their case they have the added burden of balancing resources of demand for Zen CPUs against GPUs."

The numbers from Jon Peddie Research appear to contradict comments made by Lisa Su, Chief Executive of AMD, who stated during the quarter that the launch of the company's Radeon RX 9070-series products was AMD's most successful product launch in terms of first-week sales. Yet, this is not exactly the case. Jon Peddie Research monitors how many GPU chips each company sells-in to its partners per quarter, not the number of cards sold through retailers. By contrast, Lisa Su mentioned sold through results of the Radeon RX 9070-series, referring to the final stage where the retailer sells the product to the end user.

Images of AMD's early Navi 48 graphics processors — the GPUs that power the Radeon RX 9070-series boards — indicate that their assembly took place in late October 2024, which means that production of the actual silicon started approximately 90 days prior, in late July 2024. This suggests that AMD had been building up inventory for several months ahead of the official launch on March 6, 2025. 

While the total number of GPUs and add-in boards accumulated before the release remains unclear, Jon Peddie Research reported back in March that AMD delivered around 1.43 million discrete desktop GPUs to partners in the fourth quarter of 2024. The lion's share of these processors were likely AMD's Navi 48, so it is reasonable to conclude that AMD entered the first quarter of 2025 with a substantial stockpile of Navi 48 chips. Although precise figures are not available, it is likely that AMD's partners shipped well over a million Radeon RX 9070-series graphics cards during the quarter. However, this was a result of accumulating GPUs over a period of about six months.

By contrast, the company AMD supplied its partners with only around 740,000 to 750,000 GPUs (probably mostly Navi 48 and Navi 44, although we are speculating) in the first quarter, which explains why the company could not meet demand for its Radeon RX 9070 and 9060-series products in the second quarter. The reasons why AMD did not ramp up shipments/production of its Radeon RX 9000-series RDNA 4-based GPUs in late Q4 2024 – early Q1 2025 are unclear. However, JPR's numbers indicate that the company had reduced sales (and possibly production) of GPUs from Q4 to Q1, which is an unprecedented event. This likely means that shortages of AMD's latest Radeon products — the Radeon RX 9060 and 9070 series — will persist at least through the second quarter.

"We were surprised to see AMD’s shipments drop so drastically in Q1," said Peddie. "At the same time Nvidia was ramping Blackwell filling any vacuum AMD may have left. Both companies' products have been criticized at the low end, which is traditionally a volume market. But in the past few quarters, the high end has taken off and that is where Nvidia had an open playing field, and so far, still does. So, it is a combination of economic and political instability, and consumer demand shifting to the high end that has caught AMD in a crossfire so to speak."

While shipments of graphics cards were up in the first quarter, sales of desktop processors dropped. JPR reports that the desktop CPU market contracted sharply as volumes dropped by 14.5% year-over-year and 20.6% sequentially.

"The PC market is caught in the crosswinds, some might say crossfire, of Trump's trade wars, with on-again and off-again, special cutout, and changing import/export rules," said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. "As part of the turmoil, some PC suppliers have pulled back or held orders, while a few have increased orders, hoping to lock in prices. Pre-ordering to lock in prices is a temporary fix, which will cause a depression in future quarters’ sales, as discussed here. We think overall PC sales and, subsequently, client PC GPU sales will be down for the year.”

AMD has been busy at Computex 2025, where the chipmaker unveiled the exciting Radeon RX 9060 XT and the Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series. To cap off its series of announcements, AMD is thrilled to introduce the Radeon AI Pro R9700, a PCIe 5.0 graphics card designed specifically for professional and workstation users.

RDNA 4 is an architecture geared towards gaming, but that doesn't mean AMD can't apply it to professional-grade graphics cards. For instance, RDNA 3 saw the mainstream Radeon RX 7000 series successfully coexisting with the Radeon Pro W7000 series. The same situation will occur with RDNA 4. AMD has already unveiled four RDNA 4-powered gaming graphics cards, yet the Radeon AI Pro R9700 is the first RDNA 4 professional graphics card to enter the market. The new workstation graphics card aims to replace the RDNA 3-powered Radeon Pro W7800, which has been faithfully catering to consumers since 2023.

The Radeon AI Pro R9700 utilizes the Navi 48 silicon. It's currently the largest RDNA 4 silicon to date, with a die size of 357 mm² and home to 53.9 billion transistors. Navi 48 is also found in the Radeon RX 9070 series. It's a substantially smaller silicon than the last-generation Navi 31 silicon, which is 529 mm² with 57.7 billion transistors. It's nothing short of impressive that Navi 48 is roughly 33% smaller but still has 93% of the transistors of Navi 31.

Navi 48, a product of TSMC's N4P (4nm) FinFET process node, adheres to a monolithic design. On the contrary, Navi 31 features an MCM (Multi-Chip Module) design, consisting of chiplets interconnected to a monolithic die. That's the reason why Navi 31 is so enormous. The GCD (Graphics Complex Die) alone measures 304.35 mm², whereas each of the six MCDs (Memory Cache Die) is 37.52 mm².

With Navi 48, AMD returned to a monolithic die and, with N4P's help, reduced the die size by 33%. Nonetheless, Navi 48 is up to 38% denser than Navi 31. The former has a density of 151 million transistors per mm², whereas the latter comes in at 109.1 million transistors per mm².

In terms of composition, the Navi 48 features 64 RDNA 4 Compute Units (CUs), which enable a maximum of 4,096 Streaming Processors (SPs). In contrast, the Navi 31 is equipped with 96 RDNA 3 CUs, for a total of 6,144 SPs. More CUs don't necessarily mean more performance since RDNA 4 delivers considerable generation-over-generation performance uplift over RDNA 3.

AMD Radeon AI Pro R9700 Specifications

The Radeon Pro W7800 leverages the full Navi 48 silicon, so it's rocking 4,096 SPs, 9% fewer than the Radeon Pro W7800. This correlates to the graphics card having 9% fewer AI accelerators. In the Radeon AI Pro R9700 's defense, the CUs are RDNA 4, and the AI accelerators are second-generation.

Regarding FP16 performance, the Radeon AI Pro R9700 peaks at 96 TFLOPS, 6% faster than the Radeon Pro W7800. AMD rates the graphics card with a 1,531 TOPS of AI performance.

AMD claims the Radeon AI Pro R9700 offers 2X improved performance over the Radeon Pro W7800 in DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B. For some strange reason, AMD compared the Radeon AI Pro R9700 to the GeForce RTX 5080. Tested in a few large AI models, the Radeon AI Pro R9700 delivered up to 5X higher performance than the RTX 5080.

The Radeon AI Pro R9700 is equipped with 32GB of GDDR6 memory and a 256-bit memory interface. This configuration results in a memory bandwidth of up to 640 GB/s, 11% more than the Radeon Pro W7800 32GB but 26% less than the Radeon Pro W7800 48GB. As for the Infinity Cache, the Radeon AI Pro R9700 still has 64MB, the same as the Radeon Pro W7800 32GB.

With 32GB of onboard memory, the Radeon AI Pro R9700 can tackle most AI models. It has the capacity of the Radeon Pro W7800, but not as much as the 48GB variant. The Radeon AI Pro R9700's typical blower-type design will enable users to rock up to four of them inside a single system, such as AMD's Ryzen Threadripper platform, which has good multi-GPU support. With four of them, users will have access to 128GB, more than enough for heavy models that exceed 100GB of VRAM usage.

Photographs of a cancelled AMD RX 7000-series prototype have reportedly surfaced on X. According to GOKForFree, the GPU seems to be a working sample of what could have been the Radeon RX 7500. When tested using GPU-Z, it was shown to have 6GB of memory with a 96-bit bus, 1,536 shading units, and 64 ROPs.

By comparison, the AMD Radeon RX 7600 has 8GB of GDDR6 memory with a 128-bit bus, 2,048 shading units, and 64 ROPs. The graphics card was an incremental upgrade from the RX 6650 XT and competes directly with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060.

On the other hand, TechPowerUp lists an unreleased AMD Radeon RX 7500 XT with the same memory size as the unknown card, but with fewer shading units (1,024) and ROPs (32). So, it could be that this unknown GPU is the actual RX 7500 XT, with the details listed by TechPowerUp as those for the vanilla RX 7500. After all, it’s unlikely that AMD will release an XT version of a base-spec GPU.

AMD is reportedly going big on core-counts with Zen 6 mobile next-generation, as suggested by a new rumor from HXL, backed by several other leakers. Codenamed "Medusa Point", these APUs will reportedly carry up to 22 hybrid cores, based on Zen 6, with classic, dense, and low-power options. Since Zen 6 is at least a year off, and mobile versions might not arrive until early 2027, we need to be careful about putting too much faith in this leak.

Medusa Point is slated to be the follow-up to AMD's current Zen 5-based Strix Point APU series. We probably won't see a direct shift to Medusa Point as AMD is reportedly working on the Gorgon Point (Strix Point refresh) family, planned as an intermediate step.

That being said, architecturally, Medusa Point will switch to the Zen 6 architecture, which should be detailed by AMD sometime around Computex next year. The graphics engine will allegedly adopt the updated RDNA 3.5+ design, though RDNA 4 would've been the ideal choice for many. It's probable RDNA 4 won't make its way to the APU landscape, since AMD's next-generation graphics architecture, UDNA 1 / RDNA 5, is projected for release during the same timeframe.

The mainstream Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 offerings from Medusa Point have been purported to feature up to 10 hybrid cores, divided across four classic Zen 6 cores, four dense Zen 6c cores, and two new LP (Low Power) cores. These LP cores are very likely smaller than their Zen 6c siblings, with their Voltage/Frequency operation tweaked for maximum efficiency. This is complemented by an eight Compute Unit equipped RDNA 3.5+ based graphics engine, similar to the Radeon 860M. The iGPU is a downgrade from the current 16-CU design on the Radeon 890M, but this was likely done to free up space on the chip for other components.

With its expected Computex unveiling just a week away, the key specifications of AMD’s Radeon RX 9600 XT appear to have spilled forth onto the internet.

The tip comes from prolific leakster momomo_us, but we had to double-take as the otherwise detailed post doesn’t mention the assumed subject of the leak. However, any kind of leak requires a pinch of salt, and this aligns roughly with expectations of the aforementioned 9600 XT, so let’s just add a few more grains and take a closer look.

Decoding the above, we have perhaps a reference and OC model RX 9060 XT being highlighted. The faster card can boost its Navi 44 XT RDNA 4 GPU with 2,048 Stream Processors (SPs) to 3.32 GHz, and has a game clock of 2.78 GHz. While it therefore has half the number of shaders as the potent RX 9070 XT, its boost clock is nearly 12% faster. Moreover, it boosts to almost 32% faster GPU clocks than the RX 9070 model.

With the retail embargo lifting tomorrow, reviews of AMD's China-exclusive RX 9070 GRE have gone live. Hardware publication EXPreview has published its review of a custom model from XFX, providing us with insight into the card's performance and where it stands versus the competition. Positioned as an intermediary between the RX 9070 and the soon-to-launch RX 9060 XT, the RX 9070 GRE is a series of hits and misses. It trails the RTX 5070 in rasterization, and its pricing doesn't really add to its value versus AMD's own RX 9070.

Around 10 days ago, the RX 9070 GRE unexpectedly became available for pre-order across major Chinese online stores. AMD later officially confirmed the card, but it is currently region-locked, with no word on when it might hit the global market. Under the hood, it carries a cut-down Navi 48 GPU wielding 3,072 Stream Processors (48 CUs) — roughly 25% fewer than the RX 9070 XT. It offers 12GB of GDDR6 memory at slower 18 Gbps speeds, but that is likely an artificial limitation.

The GPU launched at 4,199 RMB ($575). For context, the RX 9070 and RTX 5070 both debuted at 4,499 RMB ($625). Saving $50 means you'll be missing out on exclusives, like RTX HDR, VSR, Smooth Motion, and MFG found on the RTX 5070, and the extra VRAM and compute power with the RX 9070 that can enable 4K gaming. The RX 9070 GRE does not have an MBA (Made By AMD) variant, similar to other RX 9070 GPUs. The model under review is the XFX RX 9070 GRE Snow Wolf, a pure-white card with a triple-fan cooler and dual 8-pin connectors. Internally, the card is equipped with 20 Gbps GDDR6 modules from Samsung, so you might be able to extract some performance gains by memory overclocking.

Across a suite of games at 1440p, the RTX 5070 appears to be on average 5-10% faster than the RX 9070 GRE in raw rasterization performance. Based on our testing, we expected this to translate to a 15-20% performance gap versus the RX 9070, expanding to almost 30% versus the RX 9070 XT. The RX 9070 GRE easily outperforms the RTX 5060 Ti, which is expected with the price difference between the two. What's interesting is the raytracing performance, where the RX 9070 GRE appears to — surprisingly — keep pace with the RTX 5070 in a handful of titles.

The latest Steam Hardware survey from April shows Nvidia’s RTX 50 series GPUs making their first appearance almost four months after launch. Conversely, despite their apparent retail popularity, AMD’s RX 9000 GPUs are nowhere to be found on the list. While the absence of RDNA 4 is confusing, it might all boil down to a lack of adequate supply at MSRP.

The April Steam Hardware survey reflects a return to normality after the previous survey was skewed by an unexplained surge of Chinese users, knocking several statistics off the charts. Typical figures for operating systems, system specifications, and CPU/GPU vendor, among others, remained unchanged. Nvidia still reigns supreme in the GPU market with a 74.39% share, while Intel leads the CPU arena at 60.35%, closely followed by AMD.

Several new GPUs have gained traction among gamers, per the Steam Hardware survey, including Nvidia’s RTX 5080 (0.38%), RTX 5070 Ti (0.28%), and RTX 5070 (0.38%). The RTX 5090 being excluded from this list is self-explanatory, as that GPU is far out of the reach of the average user. After exhaustively searching the list, we found no GPU from AMD’s RX 9070 family. That’s quite telling since this has recently been one of AMD’s most successful GPU launches, coupled with Nvidia’s many shortfalls this generation.

There is a new AMD GPU on the survey, though — new to the survey statistics, at least. AMD's RX 7800 XT appears for the first time in the April 2025 figures, landing at 0.27% (the same as the 5070 Ti). The RX 7900 XT, 7900 GRE, 7600 XT, and 7600 all remain missing in action, along with virtually all Intel Arc GPUs (other than the integrated "Arc Graphics" that sits unchanged month-to-month at 0.22%).

Originally anticipated by early June, a new rumor suggests that AMD's RX 9060 XT GPUs could hit shelves on May 18, a shift of around two or three weeks. This leak originates from Board Channels, a network of sources allegedly linked to board partners. The same source also claims the RX 9070 GRE, a recurring subject in many leaks nowadays, has, purportedly, been pushed back to the fourth quarter, and we might have a good explanation for that.

AMD updated its RDNA 4 nomenclature to align with Nvidia's "X0X0" convention, probably to simplify customer understanding, even if it comes at the expense of its original identity. The RX 9060 XT family will reportedly offer 8GB and 16GB memory configurations, shifting to the budget Navi 44 die with 2,048 shaders (32 CUs) and clock speeds north of 3 GHz. Leaked specifications suggest the RX 9070 GRE, on the other hand, is equipped with a cut-down Navi 48 die packing 3,072 shaders (48 CUs) and a 12GB frame buffer.

Despite initially being suggested for a Computex reveal, followed by a launch in early June, Board Channels alleges that AMD is expediting the RX 9060 XT for launch just before Computex. By launch, we're assuming the source refers to on-shelf inventory. More interestingly, the mid-range RX 9070 GRE is apparently delayed from early May to October or November, just before 11.11 (Singles' Day in China), the largest online and offline shopping event globally.

Chinese graphics card manufacturer Zephyr (via 孤城Hardware) has launched the Radeon RX 6500, a never-before-seen graphics card from AMD. While the Radeon RX 6500 is unlikely to beat any of the best graphics cards today, the Navi 24-powered graphics card might be a good solution for some budget gamers.

The Radeon RX 6500 graphics card is currently absent from Zephyr's website. Identifying it as part of Zephyr's lineup relies solely on the logos present on the cooling fans. This Radeon RX 6500 ITX version isn't the only offering from Zephyr, as the manufacturer has listed the Radeon RX 6500LP, which features a low-profile, single-slot design utilizing a blower-type cooling system.

Surprisingly, the Radeon RX 6500 uses the same Navi 24 (codename Beige Goby) silicon as the 2022-era Radeon RX 6500 XT. It's the same full die with 1,024 Streaming Processors (SPs), 33% more SPs than the Radeon RX 6400. Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 6500 should be faster than the RX 6400 but still lags behind the Radeon RX 6500 XT due to substantial clock speed reductions to keep the TDP below 100W.

AMD Radeon RX 6500 Specifications

The clock speeds for the Radeon RX 6500 ITX version are unknown, but Zephyr listed the Radeon RX 6500LP with a 1,728 MHz base clock and 2,066 MHz boost clock. We expect the ITX SKU to feature similar clock speeds since it has the same 55W TDP as the blower SKU. As a result, the Radeon RX 6500 has a 25% lower base clock and 27% lower boost clock than the Radeon RX 6500 XT.

While the Radeon RX 6500's core specifications resemble the Radeon RX 6500 XT, the memory subsystem is from the Radeon RX 6400. It has the identical 4GB of GDDR6 memory operating at 16 Gbps across a 64-bit memory interface. The configuration results in a memory bandwidth up to 128 GB/s, 11% below the Radeon RX 6500 XT.

Mixing and matching the core and memory specifications allows Zephyr to keep the Radeon RX 6500's TDP at 55W. This is only 4% higher than the Radeon RX 6400, but a whopping 49% lower than the Radeon RX 6500 XT. The 55W TDP means the Radeon RX 6500 doesn't require any external PCIe power connectors. In addition to the dual-slot ITX design that's only 6.7 inches (171mm) long, the Radeon RX 6500 is an excellent fit for SFF builds or prebuilt upgrades.

AMD is reportedly preparing to debut its RDNA 4 workstation GPU offerings for desktops, presumably under the Radeon Pro W9000 family. As put forwaard by Hoang Anh Phu, who frequently obtains inside scoops, AMD is considering using the Navi 48 XTW die for its top-end SKUs, paired with 32GB of video memory, likely GDDR6. As always, this leak shouldn't be taken as definitive, but there's likely some truth to it given the proximity of Computex next month, followed by AMD's Advancing AI event in June.

Radeon PRO GPUs are aimed at workstation setups, rivaling Nvidia's (former) Quadro or (now incumbent) RTX PRO offerings for prosumers. These graphics cards bridge the gap between consumers and server domains, for applications like AI, HPC, DCC, CGI, CAD, VR/AR, and the list goes on.

It seems that AMD is sticking to more conservative figures for its flagship workstation offerings this generation. That's somewhat expected since Navi 48 (356mm²) is in the same ballpark as GB203 (378mm²), found in the RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell. Nvidia's top-end GB202 at 750mm², is home to the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell featuring a massive 96GB frame buffer.

Navi 48, with its 256-bit interface, enables either 16GB of memory (via eight 32-bit channels) or a theoretical maximum of 32GB in clamshell mode, which is the exact configuration being reported here.

Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, has released ONNX-optimized models that run up to 3.3x faster on compatible AMD hardware, including select Radeon GPUs and Ryzen AI APUs on mobile.

Amuse is a platform developed by AMD and TensorStack AI that allows users to generate images and short videos locally, on AMD hardware. The latest Amuse 3.0 release not only supports these updated models but also introduces a range of new features, including video diffusion, AI photo filters, and local text-to-image generation. Amuse 3.0 and AMD optimized models require the Adrenalin 24.30.31.05 preview drivers or the upcoming Adrenalin 25.4.1 mainline release.

Over the past year, AMD has partnered with several OSVs, OEMs, and ISVs to optimize AI applications from the ground up, incorporating hardware optimizations, efficient drivers, compilers, and optimized ML models, among other enhancements. Building on this partnership, Stability AI has launched Radeon-optimized versions of its Stable Diffusion family, which include Stable Diffusion 3.5 (SD3.5) and Stable Diffusion XL Turbo (SDXL Turbo). First-party metrics report a 3.3x speedup with SD3.5 Large, dropping to 2.1x for SD3.5 Large Turbo and 1.5x for SDXL Turbo compared to the base PyTorch implementations.

Following the announcement of flagship SKUs at CES, Nvidia and AMD are now bringing their latest architectures to the budget segment with their 60-class GPUs. According to leaker Hoang Anh Phu, who has a decent track record when it comes to all things AMD, the RX 9060 XT series is scheduled for announcement at Computex, which kicks off on May 20th. This is to be followed by the retail launch two weeks later in early June.

With an official confirmation of the RX 9060 branding in January, it’s about time we’re seeing these GPUs in action versus Nvidia’s RTX 5060 family. The rumored specifications don’t bring much to the table, however, with the RX 9060 XT split into 8GB and 16GB models. Both GPUs are said to use the same Navi 44 core, presumably fully enabled, outfitted with 2,048 shading units or 32 Compute Units (CUs).

With RTX 5060 Ti reviews dropping today, Nvidia could be looking at a one-month jump on AMD, based on how well these GPUs perform and sell. Of course, with Nvidia’s usual skewed first-party benchmarks, it’s hard to draw any reasonable conclusions. Computex runs from May 20 - 23, which is when we expect to see the RX 9060 XT uncovered. Likewise, if this leak holds, you can expect to pick a unit for yourself by the first week of June — based on the leaker’s two-week delta between launch and retail.

AMD is marking a major shift in the development of its ROCm open-source software stack, with the introduction of a new Instinct driver for Radeon Instinct GPUs that will be part of the ROCm toolkit. According to a blog post by AMD, the change aims to improve the toolkit's usability for ROCm users.

The new Instinct driver is a renamed version of the Linux AMDGPU driver packages that are already distributed and documented with ROCm. Previously, everything related to ROCm (including the amdgpu driver) existed as part of the ROCm software stack. But now, AMD is splitting the driver portion of the ROCm software stack into a separate branch that will live independently and carry its own identity.

These changes start with ROCm version 6.4, where ROCm is split into two groups: the Instinct Driver and the ROCm Toolkit. The latter handles everything besides the physical driver itself. The change aims to improve the flexibility of the ROCm software stack, and AMD claims new and exciting features are planned for the Instinct driver that will benefit from ROCm's bifurcation.

Some of these features include "New installation options to remove permission complexities such as user membership in the video or render groups. Future installation options may exclude packages needed to run display outputs to reduce the driver footprint. A future driver release series may be maintained for security fixes for an extended period as long term stability driver. A future driver release series may be maintained for security fixes for an extended period as long term stability driver. Users choosing to use amdgpu from the stock Linux kernels may choose to skip all the installation documentation for ROCm that references the Instinct driver. Please note this is not an AMD support option today."

The reason AMD is bifurcating ROCm seems to be to improve the longevity and flexibility of its GPU drivers. Splitting the drivers from the ROCm toolkit will allow a single Instinct driver to support multiple versions of ROCm toolkits, without upgrading or downgrading the driver to support to whichever toolkit version the user needs.

As a result, the support duration of the new Instinct drivers will greatly increase. Currently, the ROCm AMDGPU drivers support 6 months (backwards and forwards) worth of ROCm toolkit releases. With the new Instinct driver bifurcation, support duration doubles to a full year's worth of ROCm toolkit releases.

Starting with ROCm 6.4, the documentation for the bifurcated ROCm branches can be found at instinct.docs.amd.com. Information on the new Instinct-branded GPU drivers are available on the Instinct driver website. That said, AMD states the versioning scheme for the Instinct drivers will not change (which will inevitably cause some confusion). In ROCm version 6.5, the Insticnt driver version will be separate from the ROCm versioning.

A new leak from VideoCardz has detailed the alleged specifications of AMD's budget-oriented RX 9060 XT GPU from the RDNA 4 family. Reportedly, the RX 9060 XT marks the first use of the Navi 44 die, which is significantly cut down versus its elder sibling, Navi 48. Without official confirmation from AMD, it's hard to be certain about the exact specifications, so take this information with an appropriate dose of salt.

At the initial RDNA 4 unveiling in January, AMD confirmed the RX 9060 branding through one of its slides. With the RTX 5060 Ti around the corner, now is the perfect time to introduce RDNA 4 to the masses. Reportedly, there's also an RX 9070 GRE in the making, which is expected to sit between the RX 9060 XT and the RX 9070, aimed at the $400 market.

Taking a page from Nvidia's notebook, AMD is said to launch the RX 9060 XT in 8GB and 16GB versions. To be fair, this approach is quite analogous to the RX 7600 8GB and RX 7600 XT 16GB, featuring similar cores. The only difference is that both GPUs are now classified under the same XT-tier.

Based on the data supplied by VideoCardz, the RX 9060 XT offers 2,048 shader units (32 CUs), similar to its last-generation counterpart(s). We're likely seeing the full-fat Navi 44 core in effect here. The 128-bit interface allows for four memory ICs, explaining the 8GB and 16GB (clamshell) capacities. There is, however, a large bump to the clock speeds, with the RX 9060 XT rated at 3.2 GHz (+480 MHz higher than the 7600 XT), said to reach 3.3 GHz with custom models. The TGP remains unspecified, but expect it to be near 200W.

This doesn't leave much room for the RX 9060 non-XT, which may drop below 32 Compute Units. RDNA 4's architectural improvements might offset the core-count deficiency, but we don't know the exact numbers. The source claims that Navi 44 offers only three display connectors compared to four with Navi 48, while some rumors even suggest the lack of a video encoding engine like the RX 6500 XT, but that's yet to be confirmed.

The RTX 5060 Ti is rumored to be unveiled on Wednesday. Will AMD drop its RX 9060 family around the same time? It's hard to say. Computex starts in late May, but an announcement then would give Nvidia's mainstream counterpart a one-month head start. Pricing is likely not finalized at the time of this writing, though it's expected to fall between $300 and $400.

AMD released ROCm 6.4, bringing along several improvements, including framework enhancements, broader OS support, and enhancements to several performance and profiling tools. What it continues to lack is enablement for RDNA 4 GPUs, which may discourage developers from shifting to AMD's latest architecture.

When RDNA 4 hit shelves last month, day-one ROCm compatibility was highly anticipated, as was teased by AMD's VP of AI Software. ROCm is AMD's open-source GPU programming platform, rivaling Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem to power HPC and AI applications. ROCm is chiefly focused on AMD's MI Instinct Accelerators and its prosumer Radeon Pro family, but support has slowly been trickling down to consumer-grade Radeon GPUs, just not as fast as CUDA.

RDNA 4 brings several architectural improvements to the table, doubling FP16 operations per cycle, with an x8 increase in INT4 operations with sparsity. Furthermore, with support for FP8, RDNA 4 can dish out an eightfold increase over RDNA3's FP16 capabilities, again with sparsity. Without official ROCm support, these enhancements are effectively dormant. And, ironically enough, the first mention of Navi 48 (the GPU that powers the RX 9070 series) traces back to a ROCm patch last year.

In any case, AMD introduced several changes with ROCm 6.4, which can be summarized as:

• Support for CPX mode with NPS4 memory mode.
• Support for PyTorch 2.6 and 2.5.
• Support for VP9 with rocDecode/rocPyDecode.
• Several improvements to the ROCm Compute Profiler.
• Support for Oracle Linux 9 and the Radeon PRO W7800 GPU.

Despite recent pushes to challenge the CUDA moat, AMD's hardware support remains perpetually behind Nvidia's. ROCm support for consumer-grade Radeon GPUs on Windows, which began in 2022, now extends across almost all GPUs from the RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 families, excluding HIP SDK support for the RX 6600 to RX 6750 XT range. I said "almost all" as the list lacks the RX 7650 GRE and the RX 7900 GRE. The Linux side is even more dire, compatible with only four Radeon GPUs.

It's not all bad news, as you can now use ROCm on AMD's Strix Halo family of APUs featuring up to 128GB of memory, making them great options for powering AI and HPC workloads on the go. AMD generally releases ROCm updates on a monthly cadence, so we could see RDNA 4 support spring up with the next release. However, this inconsistency could sway developers towards Nvidia, which offers better and more predictable compatibility.

AMD's upcoming Dragon Range Refresh CPU family has had some new details revealed by a recent early listing on Chinese retailer site JD.com. The existence of the Dragon Range Refresh, or the Ryzen 8000HX line, has been known about since MSI leaked the news in January.

The JD listing for an Asus laptop featuring the upcoming ROG Strix G16 2025 has been widely shared through screenshots on Weibo. The screenshot below has been widely shared and confirmed by numerous places. The new G16 lists a Ryzen 9 8940HX as its CPU, alongside an RTX 5070 Ti, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.

The Ryzen 9 8940HX, a part of the presumed Dragon Range Refresh, is expected to replace the Ryzen 9 7940HX. The G16 listing continues beyond the screenshot to share that the 8940HX will be a 16-core/32-thread chip that boosts up to 5.3 GHz. That represents a 100 MHz improvement over the 7940HX's 5.2 GHz boost clock, typical for a generational refresh.

We've seen the Ryzen 9 8940HX before in a premature Best Buy listing for the same Asus laptop, also paired with the then-unreleased RTX 5070 Ti. The prices also line up, with the ¥13,999 price tag seen above converting exactly to the same $1,899 price tag the Strix G16 carried in January. This hopefully will not be the cheapest way to acquire an 8940HX, as the 7940HX can currently be had for under $1,200 in laptops and mini PCs, though Asus's Strix line often carries a luxury tax that should be accounted for.

AMD, strangely enough, has still not officially announced Dragon Range Refresh. MSI first dropped a premature press release featuring the 8000HX series during CES 2025, with Asus listing the Strix G16 2025 a week later; both listings were quickly removed after AMD declined to issue a release on the new CPUs.

Now that the Strix G16 has been listed a second time, perhaps also erroneously, it remains for AMD to announce their refresh line or remain secretive. The Dragon Range Refresh has definitively had its thunder stolen, though what thunder it could've had as a refresh of a two-year-old laptop-only CPU family no one knows.

AMD processors were instrumental in achieving a new world record during a recent Ansys Fluent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation run on the Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). According to a press release by Ansys, it ran a 2.2-billion-cell axial turbine simulation for Baker Hughes, an energy technology company, testing its next-generation gas turbines aimed at increasing efficiency. The simulation previously took 38.5 hours to complete on 3,700 CPU cores. By using 1,024 AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators paired with AMD EPYC CPUs in Frontier, the simulation time was slashed to 1.5 hours. This is more than 25 times faster, allowing the company to see the impact of the changes it makes on designs much more quickly.

Frontier was once the fastest supercomputer in the world, and it was also the first one to break into exascale performance. It replaced the Summit supercomputer, which was decommissioned in November 2024. However, the El Capitan supercomputer, located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, broke Frontier’s record at around the same time. Both Frontier and El Capitan are powered by AMD GPUs, with the former boasting 9,408 AMD EPYC processors and 37,632 AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators. On the other hand, the latter uses 44,544 AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators.

Given those numbers, the Ansys Fluent CFD simulator apparently only used a fraction of the power available on Frontier. That means it has the potential to run even faster if it can utilize all the available accelerators on the supercomputer. It also shows that, despite Nvidia’s market dominance in AI GPUs, AMD remains a formidable competitor, with its CPUs and GPUs serving as the brains of some of the fastest supercomputers on Earth.

“By scaling high-fidelity CFD simulation software to unprecedented levels with the power of AMD Instinct GPUs, this collaboration demonstrates how cutting-edge supercomputing can solve some of the toughest engineering challenges, enabling breakthroughs in efficiency, sustainability, and innovation,” said Brad McCredie, AMD Senior Vice President for Data Center Engineering.

Even though AMD can deliver top-tier performance at a much cheaper price than Nvidia, many AI data centers prefer Team Green because of software issues with AMD’s hardware.

One high-profile example was Tiny Corp’s TinyBox system, which had problems with instability with its AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards. The problem was so bad that Dr. Lisa Su had to step in to fix the issues. And even though it was purportedly fixed, the company still released two versions of the TinyBox AI accelerator — one powered by AMD and the other by Nvidia. Tiny Corp also recommended the more expensive Team Green version, with its six RTX 4090 GPUs, because of its driver quality.

If Team Red can fix the software support on its great hardware, then it could likely get more customers for its chips and get a more even footing with Nvidia in the AI GPU market.

AMD allegedly plans to launch a special-edition RX 9070 GRE GPU, which is considered a cost-effective RDNA 4 option for the budget market, per IThome. These special-edition GPUs were initially intended for the Chinese market, but some GRE models later became available globally. Though exact specifications are unknown, the reported 12GB of memory aligns this GPU as a viable option for the increasingly growing 1440p market.

When AMD introduced the RX 6750 GRE and RX 7900 GRE in 2023, the GRE moniker stood for "Golden Rabbit Edition," coinciding with the Chinese zodiac. With the RX 7650 GRE in early February, however, this badge was seemingly renamed to "Great Radeon Edition," making the tag more general, suited for international audiences, and not tied to a specific year.

Following AMD's hierarchy, the RDNA 4 pack will presumably be led by the RX 9070 XT, the RX 9070, and the RX 9070 GRE. Regarding specifications, we will likely see a cut-down Navi 48 chip with an alleged 12GB frame buffer across a 192-bit memory interface. Given that AMD's 60 XT-grade GPUs typically occupy the $350 territory, we might see the RX 9070 GRE in the ballpark of $450. This should be a well-rounded estimate, as it sits right between a potential RX 9060 XT ($350 expected) and the RX 9070 ($550).

Nvidia is rumored to launch its RTX 5060 Ti 8GB/16GB offerings in the third week of April. We probably don't need a crystal ball to see that Jensen is aiming this GPU right at the $400 mark. This might be an opportunity for the RX 9070 GRE to match or even nudge below Nvidia's pricing. In any case, final specifications of the RX 9070 GRE, based on how much AMD decides to trim Navi 48, will dictate pricing and performance against the RTX 5060 Ti.

Street prices haven't precisely adhered to intended MSRPs this generation, primarily due to supply constraints. We've discussed this problem in detail, but the gist is that TSMC can only process so many wafers each month. In any case, the RX 9070 GRE will likely debut as a China-exclusive model at launch. Global availability could be timed near the RX 9060 series, with this model serving as an additional option to help mitigate demand, but that's speculation.

Getting hold of the latest and greatest graphics card is almost always a challenge, thanks to scalpers, and the recent market hasn't been much different. Users are eager to get their hands on the new RTX 5000 and RX 9000 series GPUs, but finding a readily available supply is far from typical.

However, Damien Mason over at Club386 has noticed one vendor taking steps to manage their GPU supply in a way that directly impacts scalpers' ability to swoop in and raid available stock. Amazon has a handful of product listings reserving various RTX 5000 and RX 9000 GPUs and prebuilt PC's with these cards as exclusive items for Amazon Prime members.

This isn't true for every listing that features these cards but it is the case for a few. If you are logged into an Amazon Prime account, you probably wouldn't be wise to the situation, as there is no indication on the product pages that these products are exclusives.

However, if you find them while signed out or logged into an account with an Amazon Prime membership, you'll notice a tag that says "Exclusively for Prime Members" on the product search page. And the product listing includes a button to join Amazon Prime, rather than add the item to your cart.

We've been covering the scalping situation, so it's interesting to see a vendor as large as Amazon offering a path for sellers to take, which would mitigate the issue. Some resellers have listed AMD RX 9000 series GPUs for as much as $2,000 (USD), while system integrators have seen RTX 5000 series GPUs offered for up to $3,000 (USD).

We took the opportunity to explore this claim for ourselves and were able to confirm listings for both GPUs and prebuilt PCs featuring these graphics cards that were labeled as Amazon Prime exclusives when accessing the product pages from outside of a Prime membership account.

It's important to note that Amazon has not officially declared this implementation as a tactic for combating scalpers, but it's hard not to see it that way. Then again, if scapling continues to be profitable, we're sure that resellers can afford their own Amazon Prime accounts.

This article covers our picks for the best graphics cards for gaming in 2026. Amid the AI gold rush and consequent supply crunch for consumer silicon, no truly new gaming GPUs have been introduced in almost a year. If you haven't already upgraded your graphics card after the GeForce RTX 50-series and Radeon RX 9000-series launches in 2025, well, you're still looking at the exact same products now.

AMD did make its formerly China-only Radeon RX 9070 GRE available globally after Computex 2026, but in our review, we found that $549 product to be too expensive given the level of performance it delivers and the compromises made to hit its price point, so it isn't joining the list here. Check out that coverage for all the details.

Most of the products we recommend remain at elevated prices compared to their MSRPs, but this is just life in mid-2026.

It's admittedly cold comfort, but unless you're shopping for an RTX 5090, graphics card prices haven't risen much more than they already did earlier this year. Compared to the doubling or tripling of prices we've seen for RAM kits and SSDs in 2026 versus last year, a GPU upgrade remains a relatively affordable (and self-contained) option, either as a boost for an existing PC or part of an all-new parts list.

Even if you can’t build an all-new system, you can just put a new graphics card in an older PC and still enjoy boosts to gaming performance, image quality, or both—especially if you can upgrade your monitor at the same time.

As we discuss in further depth below, the arrival of DLSS 4.5 upscaling (for RTX 40-series and 50-series cards, at least) and expanded multipliers for Multi-Frame Generation, which now can boost frame rates by up to 5x or 6x, means that driving a high-resolution, high-refresh-rate monitor is now easier than ever if you're considering a GeForce RTX 50-series graphics card.

Read on to see our picks in today's gaming graphics card market.

Best graphics cards for gaming, at a glance

The above list shows all the latest-gen graphics cards we feel stand out in their segments. If you want to see how all of the current and prior generation GPUs stack up, check our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. We also have performance benchmarks further below.

When accounting for pricing, we perform our own research to find the midpoint of current prices for a given graphics card, rather than taking a vendor's MSRP at face value. We feel this method tends to be most representative of the price you're likely to see for products in stock.

If you can find a card for less than this midpoint, it's likely closer to (or even less than) a vendor's MSRP and a better value. Conversely, if you find one for more than this midpoint, it could be a worse value (or too close in price to a more powerful card that's a step up). Tread carefully.

The overall performance ranking incorporates 19 games from our 2026 test suite, which takes the geometric mean (i.e., equal weighting) for both rasterization and ray tracing games. Note that we are not including any upscaling or frame generation results in the table.

Raw performance may be the most important consideration for most gamers, but it's not the only metric that matters. Our subjective rankings below factor in price, power usage, and power efficiency, and features colored by our own years of experience. Others may offer a slightly different take, but all of the cards on this list are worthy of your consideration.

Upscaling and frame generation mean GPUs are more than just a chip

GPU performance goes beyond the hardware these days. Choosing a particular GPU vendor means you're buying into a complex software stack that includes upscaling, frame generation, and (more rarely) AI-powered RT denoising technologies.

In Nvidia's corner, the DLSS 4.5 upscaling model and its second-generation transformer architecture offer superior image quality to other upscaling tech (and with lower input resolutions, meaning higher potential performance), but it's more computationally expensive than past DLSS models and works best on RTX 50-series and 40-series cards.

The DLSS 4 model and its first-gen transformer architecture still work with cards going all the way back to the RTX 20-series family. Not all games implement DLSS 4 natively, but Nvidia allows you to force the usage of that model in many older titles through the Nvidia App utility, so you can practically always get the latest and greatest.

Between native support and driver overrides, DLSS is available in virtually any modern game you might want to play. Nvidia recently marked DLSS feature availability in over 1000 titles.

RTX 50-series GPUs are Nvidia's first with support for multi-frame generation (MFG), which allows Blackwell GPUs to insert anywhere from one to five AI-generated intermediate frames between each native one (for a 2x, 3x, 4x, or even 5x or 6x frame rate boost). RTX 40-series GPUs also support framegen, but only with a 2x boost.

Meanwhile, AMD's FSR 4 offers AI-enhanced upscaling with superior image quality to other FSR versions, but official support for it is limited to RX 9000-series Radeons for now. AMD will bring FSR 4 upscaling to RX 7000-series cards in July 2026 and RX 6000-series cards in early 2027.

In the meantime, AMD's FSR 3.1 and earlier upscalers still work on any GPU, but the image quality tends to be noticeably lower than both DLSS and FSR 4.

AI-enhanced FSR framegen (aka ML Frame Generation) arrived on AMD cards as part of the FSR Redstone update late last year. Like FSR 4 upscaling, ML Frame Generation is limited to Radeon RX 9000 cards, and it can be enabled in compatible games using a control panel override for titles that don't natively have it.

Legacy FSR frame gen remains available, too. Its framerate-doubling boost remains cross-compatible with GPUs from all vendors, but its image quality can't keep up with the AI-powered frame gen tech of the latest AMD and Nvidia models.

Intel XeSS upscaling can be superior to FSR 3.x, but it isn't available in as many games as FSR or DLSS. It works best on Arc GPUs, but like FSR, it's cross-compatible with a wide range of graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia if you need it.

XeSS 2 with AI-enhanced frame generation is now available in 95 games as of this writing and requires an Arc GPU. XeSS 3 brings multi frame generation to the party through both native support and a driver override in compatible titles.

All that said, we don't think you should go out of your way to buy an Intel Arc card for gaming in 2026 for reasons we'll get into later.

1. Best high-end graphics card: GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, $1099.99

If you want the best blend of high performance and cutting-edge graphics tech out there for 1440p or 4K gaming, the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is it. This card comes with full support for Nvidia’s latest DLSS 4.5 upscaling and Multi Frame Generation tech, and its 16GB of VRAM gives you full freedom to enable every DLSS 4 feature.

AMD’s closest competitor, the Radeon RX 9070 XT, is way cheaper than the RTX 5070 Ti right now, but the AMD card obviously doesn’t support DLSS 4 or MFG. For the privilege of those capabilities, you'll generally need to spend a whopping 45% more cash right now for just 5% more baseline performance than AMD’s best before you start enabling all the DLSS 4 features Blackwell supports.

Is that worth it? Yes, if you can swing it. Here's why: getting the best gaming performance on modern graphics cards is as much a software problem as a hardware one. Tuning your gaming experience to taste requires access to high-quality upscaling, frame generation, and (more infrequently) an AI-powered RT denoiser like DLSS Ray Reconstruction.

Even amid its shift to AI and data center products, Nvidia ensures that its full suite of DLSS tech is adopted in virtually every new game, whereas AMD's support of FSR 4 adoption has become rather hit-or-miss.

The RTX 5070 Ti also offers superior RT performance versus the RX 9070 XT across our 2026 test suite. Beyond that baseline, Nvidia is working with developers to enable impressive path-traced effects in many of the latest AAA releases.

In our recent experience, path-traced games play best with DLSS 4.5 upscaling and MFG at your disposal, and being able to consistently rely on the availability of those features makes the extra cash for the 5070 Ti worth it.

Our recent GPU Hierarchy retesting has shown that high-end graphics cards are becoming five- to eight-year investments, and Nvidia's ongoing commitment to developer relations and new software features means that you'll enjoy a first-class gaming experience throughout the life of your 5070 Ti no matter what games you want to play on it.

Spread out over that time span, the extra cost of the RTX 5070 Ti versus the RX 9070 XT is worth it for the better experience.

What about the RTX 5080? Nvidia's second-fastest Blackwell card is anywhere from 8% to 16% faster than the 5070 Ti, with the biggest gap at 4K. Prices for the 5080 in June 2026 remain insane, however, and at the midpoint of current prices, the 5080 is 33% more expensive than the 5070 Ti.

There's no way the RTX 5080 offers anywhere close to enough value for the money to justify the step up right now unless you're looking for the fastest thing this side of a 5090 for 4K gaming.

Read: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti review

2. Best enthusiast value graphics card: Radeon RX 9070 XT, $759.99

The Radeon RX 9070 XT is AMD's most well-rounded graphics card in years. It delivers raw gaming performance within spitting distance of the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti for far less money, making it a strong value at first glance. But that appealing price tag comes with a number of asterisks in mid-2026 that mean it's no longer our first pick for high-end PC gaming.

AMD shored up two of its greatest weaknesses against Nvidia with the RX 9070 XT's RDNA 4 architecture: RT performance and AI acceleration, both of which are closer to Nvidia's latest and greatest. And AMD did all that while keeping power efficiency right there with Nvidia, too.

The FSR 4 upscaler is a big jump in image quality over FSR 3, and FSR ML Frame Generation now offers higher-quality framegen on the RX 9070 XT than FSR 3's approach, although it's still limited to a simple doubling of frame rates versus DLSS Multi Frame Generation's versatility.

The problem for the RX 9070 XT in mid-2026 is that FSR 4.x upscaling still trails Nvidia's flagship DLSS 4.5 in image quality, and AMD isn't driving the adoption of FSR 4 features nearly as aggressively as Nvidia is for DLSS. Driver-level overrides for those features can't entirely close the gap.

Worse, you might find the RX 9070 XT entirely shut out of features that you might want to enable in certain games. For just a couple of examples, Radeon gamers can't enable path-traced effects at all in recent titles like Pragmata and Resident Evil Requiem, and 007 First Light sticks you with FSR 3 upscaling that can't be overriden through a driver toggle due to the way it's implemented.

And in our latest GPU Hierarchy retesting with the RX 9070 XT, we saw major performance issues in Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced and minor visual corruptions in Stalker 2 that weren't present on GeForces or on RX 7000- or RX 6000-series cards. We don't think these issues should have slipped past any QA program, especially for such popular and high-profile games, but they sting especially hard on a current-gen product.

All that means the overall ownership experience of an RTX 5070 Ti and an RX 9070 XT is significantly different in mid-2026. We think that gamers shopping in this price class should be able to expect a consistently high level of software feature support and quality across all the games they might want to play, and Nvidia provides that assurance better than AMD does right now.

If you're willing to gamble with the availability of FSR 4 features, for RT or path-traced effects, and don't care to tune the smoothness of your gaming experience with frame generation, the RX 9070 XT's shortcomings versus the RTX 5070 Ti may be easier to overlook given the large amount of cash that will remain in your pocket.

But we also think that you should look closely at what you're giving up before reflexively choosing an RX 9070 XT over an RTX 5070 Ti, despite its strong value at a glance.

Read: AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT review

3. Best midrange graphics card: GeForce RTX 5070, $659.99

Until 2026 rolled around, the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB had been our entry-to-midrange Blackwell gaming favorite. But the $579 midpoint of current pricing puts the 5060 Ti 16GB's on-shelf price above that of the RTX 5070's $549 MSRP, and the 5070 is one of the least marked-up graphics cards out there at the moment.

As a result, it's possible to find RTX 5070s for about $670, and that makes it an easy call to step up for less than $100 more than 5060 Ti 16GBs.

The RTX 5070 is about 30% faster than the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB across our 2026 test suite, and that's a huge leap that you'll easily see on the right monitor for just 15% more money.

The advent of DLSS 4.5 upscaling, which makes it possible to achieve superior delivered image quality at lower input resolutions than older DLSS versions, also takes some VRAM pressure off the RTX 5070's 12GB of GDDR7, making the deployment of RT and DLSS MFG more practical on this card than it has been in the past.

And as with the RTX 5070 Ti, the universal availability of DLSS 4.5 (both natively and through app overrides) plus MFG makes this card a fast and flexible performer across all of the games you might want to play in 2026.

Given the image quality of DLSS 4.5 and the smoothness boost of MFG, along with the higher baseline RT performance of this card versus the 9070 in our 2026 testing, we think the 5070 should be your first pick for a midrange gaming card right now.

In an ideal world, the RTX 5070 would have more VRAM to allow for unhindered exploration of everything DLSS 4 and MFG have to offer, especially at a native 4K resolution. If you're pushing those limits, we'd still recommend the Radeon RX 9070 thanks to its 16GB of VRAM.

But if you're on a 1440p monitor where VRAM is less of an issue and want DLSS 4.5 over FSR 4, as most gamers do, the RTX 5070 is still a strong performer, and you're less likely to run into its limits.

Read: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 review

4. An AMD midrange alternative: Radeon RX 9070, $629.99

If you primarily play raster titles at native resolution and aren't on board with upscaling or framegen, the Radeon RX 9070 remains a strong midrange alternative to the RTX 5070. It's one of the least marked-up 16GB graphics cards available even with today's AI headwinds, and in a world where MSRPs have largely been forgotten, that makes the RX 9070 a strong value.

The GeForce RTX 5070 and RX 9070 go neck-and-neck in our test suite, but the RX 9070 has 16GB of VRAM and the RTX 5070 has just 12GB. Especially if you're trying to push 4K games at native resolution, that extra VRAM matters.

But the advent of DLSS 4.5 upscaling, which provides image quality that's practically indistinguishable from native rendering even at relatively low input resolutions, means that the RTX 5070 is a more potent midrange graphics card in 2026 than it was at launch.

On top of their inherent technical superiority, you can find DLSS 4 and MFG in most every game released today, which can't be said for FSR 4.x upscaling or ML framegen. AMD's driver overrides make up some of the gap, to be sure, but not all of it.

And as with the RX 9070 XT, AMD gamers may find themselves locked out of certain features like path tracing (in major releases like Pragmata and Resident Evil Requiem) or FSR overrides (in 007 First Light) entirely.

The RX 9070 is subject to the same minor image quality issues and performance hitches we saw with the RX 9070 XT, and those issues could certainly be overcome with future software updates. But we think that if you're looking for the best midrange graphics card, it should be free of those issues entirely, and so the RTX 5070 is our first pick for this price point right now.

Read: AMD Radeon RX 9070 review

5. Best enthusiast value graphics card: Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB, $469.99

AMD's Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB can handle basically anything the mainstream gamer can throw at it at 1920x1080 and 2560x1440, all at a price that comes in way under the sky-high markups on the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB as of this writing.

At a midpoint of $459.99 in mid-2026, prices for the RX 9060 XT 16GB are the highest we've ever seen, dulling the 9060 XT 16GB's reputation as the value-minded builder's GPU of choice. But with no cheaper Radeons worth recommending in the lineup, what can you do?

In any case, the RX 9060 XT enjoys the much-improved ray-tracing and AI performance of the RDNA 4 architecture, both of which bring Radeons a lot closer to the latest Nvidia competition. And its 16GB of VRAM gives mainstream gamers the assurance they'll basically never find VRAM a bottleneck in modern games at 1080p and 1440p resolutions.

Like the RX 9070 XT, the 9060 XT 16GB gives you access to AMD's much-improved FSR 4 upscaling tech, allowing you to boost performance with a small hit to image quality in the small but growing list of titles that support it.

Even with its new ML-powered model, FSR Frame Generation remains limited to a doubling of output frame rate at best, so it’s not a direct competitor to Nvidia’s DLSS 4 with MFG.

If you want more frames, AMD just launched the RX 9070 GRE globally for $549, and it provides a decent step up in performance for less than $100 more, especially if you're only gaming at 1080p or 1440p. But the more powerful RX 9070 can be found for just $50 more than the GRE, and then you're contemplating the even more powerful and versatile RTX 5070, too.

The RTX 5060 Ti 8GB is the RX 9060 XT 16GB's closest Nvidia competition, dollar for dollar, but we can’t recommend it at all. If you're spending over $350 on a GPU, we don't think you should have to fine-tune every setting to avoid running out of VRAM. The RX 9060 XT is easy to live with for a wide range of gamers in a wide range of titles, and that’s why it won our Editor’s Choice award.

Read: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB review

6. The best graphics card for 1080p gaming: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060, $369.99

If you want to get your game on at 1080p, we think the RTX 5060 is still your best bet in mid-2026. The midpoint of RTX 5060 prices is around $370 right now thanks to the AI crunch, but you can still find them for as little as $350 if you're willing to shop around.

The RTX 5060 has impressive baseline performance for 1080p gaming in wildly popular titles like Fortnite, Counter-Strike 2, Marvel Rivals, and Apex Legends that aren't hungry for giant pools of VRAM. And if you are trying to push higher output resolutions in demanding AAA games, the universal availability of DLSS 4.5 upscaling means that it's easy to achieve near-native image quality at lower input resolutions than before, making the RTX 5060 a more flexible performer than ever.

If you can tune your settings right, enabling DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Generation could make for an even smoother ride on this card, but we find that 8GB of VRAM isn't enough to consistently enable framegen in the titles where you'd really want it. The feature often doesn't work if you're already at the limits of the RTX 5060's memory pool (or that of any 8GB Blackwell card), since the MFG AI model needs some VRAM of its own to run.

AMD's toughest competition for the RTX 5060 is the RX 9060 XT 8GB, which also lists for $299 but is now selling for about the same $350 as you'll see RTX 5060s going for. Supply of those cards has largely dried up in mid-2026, however, and you're likely to see only a couple options for them from any e-tailer.

Despite its much-maligned 8GB of VRAM, the 9060 XT 8GB put in a strong showing in our 2026 GPU Hierarchy testing, but not consistently enough to beat out the RTX 5060 and take home our general recommendation.

When the RX 9060 XT can bring its full compute horsepower to bear in certain games, it can handily outpace the RTX 5060, so it's worth checking out results like those from our RX 9070 GRE review and seeing whether a game you love benefits from the Radeon's raw muscle.

But if you want a more consistently solid gaming experience, we'd still recommend the RTX 5060.

Read: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti review

7. The best graphics card, period: GeForce RTX 5090, $4299

There's nothing else like the GeForce RTX 5090. If you want to turn on every bell and whistle in modern games at 4K (or beyond), the RTX 5090's sheer shader and Tensor Core horsepower, along with support for Nvidia's DLSS 4 upscaling and multi-frame generation, lets you tune your gaming experience to perfection even on high-refresh-rate 4K displays.

If you're a hardcore PC gamer who demands only the best, the hair will stand up on the back of your neck when you watch the RTX 5090 breeze through workloads that other graphics cards leak out all their thermal gel about.

Prices for the RTX 5090 have always been elevated, but they're stratospheric in early 2026. Major e-tailers only have a few different models listed, and prices start at $3500 or so and only go up from there. Nvidia's $1999 MSRP is pure imagination in current market conditions.

At those prices, an RTX 5090 is an indulgence of the highest order, but then again, it always has been. Without a compelling AMD alternative even on the horizon, considerations of value don't really apply here. If you truly need (or want) this class of gaming or AI performance, you're going to have to pay up.

This card needs a system with a massive power supply, one of our best gaming CPUs, and a top-shelf monitor to take full advantage of its astounding capabilities, and all those spendy components add up quick. But if you have a big enough bankroll to consider shopping for a graphics card of this caliber, you probably don't need us to tell you all that.

If Nvidia and its industry partners fixed the meltdown-prone ATX12V-2x6 connector, the RTX 5090 would be as close to gaming perfection as any graphics card that's ever been made. Guess that's something to improve on the RTX 6090, if it ever arrives.

Read: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition review

8. The cheapest graphics card worth buying: GeForce RTX 5050

If you have to save every penny on a new graphics card in 2026, you're hard up for good budget options. We previously recommended Intel's Arc B570 here, but after completing our 2026 GPU Hierarchy retesting, we're bumping it in favor of the RTX 5050, which is currently selling for about $300, or about $50 more than the B570.

Here's why: we think if you're spending any amount of money on a graphics card, it should just work. You should expect consistent feature support over time in games, universal support for upscaling and (optionally) frame generation when you need them, and consistently high performance in games.

The RTX 5050 unreservedly checks all those boxes, while we couldn't even complete our testing of the Arc B570 (or B580) for our 2026 GPU Hierarchy until the literal day before this guide update goes live, due to a months-long settings lockout with UE5's Nanite and Lumen in a little title you may have heard of called Fortnite.

We can't say when a similarly major issue might occur again with the Arc B570 in any game, and so we're no longer recommending it. Unless you're willing to gamble and need to save every possible dollar on a graphics card, we think you should just save up a bit more cash and buy an RTX 5050.

The RTX 5050 isn't the fastest GPU around, to be sure, and its 8GB of VRAM is a constraint for anything beyond 1080p gaming in mid-2026. But it delivers solid enough native raster performance at 1080p, and it beats out the Arc B570 even before you enable DLSS 4.5 upscaling. And if you do want the performance boost of DLSS, you're getting access to the best and most widely adopted upscaler on the market.

On top of that, the extra $50 over the Arc B570 means that you have the full strength of Nvidia's developer relations team and software support behind you when you go to play the latest games, and we think that reliable software support makes all the difference between a GPU that's fun and affordable and one that's merely cheap.

Read: GeForce RTX 5050 review

How we test the best graphics cards

Determining pure graphics card performance is best done by eliminating all other bottlenecks — as much as possible, at least. To that end, we've selected components for our test rig , most notably AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU, one of the best CPUs for gaming.

We test across the three most common gaming resolutions, 1080p, 1440p, and 4K, using a mix of high and ultra settings, depending on the title. Where possible, we use 'reference' cards for all of these tests, like Nvidia's Founders Edition models and AMD's reference designs. Most midrange and lower GPUs don't get reference models, however, and in some cases we only have factory-overclocked cards for testing. We do our best to select cards that are close to the reference specs in such cases.

For each graphics card, we follow the same testing procedure. We run one pass of each benchmark to "warm up" the GPU after launching the game, then perform our actual test runs across each resolution.

We carefully review our test data and check for anomalies. For example, we always expect the RTX 5080 to be faster than the RTX 5070 Ti. If it's not, and we're not in a CPU limited situation, we'll recheck both cards to ensure that our standings our accurate. We also check and retest in cases of subtler issues, as when a transient hitch or frame-time spike causes a large dip in 1% low FPS.

Due to the length of time required for testing each GPU, updated drivers and game patches inevitably come out that can impact performance. We periodically retest a few sample cards to verify our results are still valid, and if not, we go through and retest the affected game(s) and GPU(s). We may also add games to our test suite over time, if one comes out that is popular and conducive to testing. See what makes a good game benchmark for our selection criteria.

Best graphics cards performance results

Our updated test suite of games consists of 19 games at present, eight of which have ray tracing enabled (or require RT to run at all).

We test without any upscaling or frame generation technologies enabled. We expect that most gamers will want to enable these features, but they complicate apples-to-apples comparisons between GPU vendors due to inherent differences in output image quality. To keep it simple, we present native resolution performance as a baseline.

The data in the following charts is from testing conducted during the past several months. We've tested all of the latest GPUs at every resolution and setting, even where it generally doesn't make sense (e.g. 4K with ray tracing at single digit framerates).

For each resolution and setting, the first chart shows the geometric mean (i.e. equal weighting) for all tested games. The second chart shows performance in the 11 pure raster games, and the third chart focuses in on ray tracing performance in eight games.

The charts below contain all the current Nvidia RTX 50-series and AMD RX 9000-series graphics cards. We're leaving Intel Arc cards out of the standings for now due to software compatibility issues with our test suite, and we'll include those results when those issues are corrected and we have the opportunity to retest them.

Our GPU benchmarks hierarchy contains additional data for every GPU spanning multiple generations of hardware. The charts are color coded with AMD in red, Nvidia in blue, and Intel in gray to make it easier to see what's going on.

The following charts are up to date as of June 2026.

Best Graphics Cards — 1080p

Best Graphics Cards — 1440p

Best Graphics Cards — 4K

Additional Shopping Tips

When buying a graphics card, consider the following:

• Monitor Resolution: The more pixels you're pushing, the more performance you need. You don't need a top-of-the-line GPU to game at 1080p, but you will certainly want more power at 1440p or 4K.
• PSU: Make sure that your power supply has enough juice and the right 6-, 8- and/or 16-pin connector(s). Nvidia, AMD, and Intel board partners will all make PSU recommendations alongside their products that you can use as a baseline, so if you're unsure whether your PC can provide enough power, be sure to check those spec sheets first. If you have an older PSU, be mindful that power supplies do lose capacity with time, so if you're contemplating a high-end GPU, it might be time to upgrade your GPU, too.
• Video Memory: In 2026, 8GB of VRAM is the bare minimum you'll want to play the latest games at 1080p, and it's the smallest amount of memory you'll find on a new card. Midrange cards tend to feature 12GB of VRAM, which is generally enough for raster gaming all the way out to 4K but may present limitations for RT even at 1440p. If you're planning to push a 4K display without upscaling or want to explore RT gaming without restriction, we recommend a 16GB card.
• FreeSync or G-Sync? Either variable refresh rate (VRR) technology will synchronize your GPU's frame delivery with your screen's refresh rate. Nvidia supports G-Sync and G-Sync Compatible displays (for recommendations, see our Best Gaming Monitors list). And most every G-Sync Compatible display also supports AMD FreeSync these days, so this vendor war is largely over.
• Upscaling and Frame Generation technologies: Nvidia's DLSS is in practically every game, and the latest DLSS 4.5 tech provides high-quality upscaling and frame generation (on RTX 40-series to boost performance to taste with practically no loss of image quality. AMD FSR 4 provides AI-enhanced upscaling on RX 9000-series cards, and a version compatible with RX 7000-series cards arrives in July 2026. Intel XeSS can deliver better image quality than older versions of FSR, but the core upscaler hasn't been updated in some time, and it's not as widely adopted as either DLSS or FSR, so it shouldn't influence your buying decision either way.

Finding Discounts on the Best Graphics Cards

While deep discounts are rare on graphics cards in 2026, you might find some particularly tasty deals on occasion. Check out the latest Newegg promo codes, Best Buy promo codes and Micro Center coupon codes for potential savings.

Want to comment on our best graphics picks for gaming? Let us know what you think in the Tom's Hardware Forums.

MORE: HDMI vs. DisplayPort: Which Is Better For Gaming?

MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy

Demand for AMD’s latest Radeon RX 9070-series graphics cards is so high that it is close to impossible to get a Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT add-in board (AIB) at its recommended price in the U.S., Europe, or just about anywhere else. In fact, AMD claims that its latest Radeon RX 9070 XT discrete GPU for desktop PCs is its most successful standalone AMD Radeon graphics card ever in terms of first-week sales. Lisa Su, chief executive of AMD, said in an interview that the Radeon RX 9070 XT outsold its predecessors by a factor of 10 in the first week.

"Radeon RX 9070 XT has been a fantastic success, actually, it is the number one selling [graphics card] of all of the AMD Radeon generations for first week sales by far. 10X higher than previous generations," Lisa Su said in an interview with Asus Tony. "We like to see people happy, and people are very happy with the Radeon RX 9070 XT."

First-week sales are, of course, a very interesting metric that reflects how many products were stockpiled for early birds and how many early birds were willing to buy them in the first week of sales. However, it does not reflect how many GPUs per launch quarter AMD sells, and this is perhaps a more traditional metric. That metric, in the case of AMD, did not exactly impress in recent years. Perhaps AMD has managed to sell significantly more halo products in Q1 2025 than it did with its previous generations? Let's try to analyze this. 

Pictures of AMD's Navi 48 GPUs — which power AMD's Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT AIBs — that we have seen so far indicate that the parts were assembled in late October, 2024, so the company has been stockpiling Navi 48 graphics processing units for months before formally introducing them on March 6, 2025. We have no idea how many chips and cards AMD and its partners stockpiled before March, but AMD shipped about 1.43 million discrete desktop GPUs to its partners in Q4 2024, according to Jon Peddie Research, and it is unlikely that these were outgoing RDNA 3-based processors. It is reasonable to assume that AMD had plenty of Navi 48 GPUs on hand as of Q1 2025, though the exact number is unknown.

With its family of GPUs based on the RDNA 4 microarchitecture, AMD decided not to pursue the high-end segment of the market, leaving them entirely for Nvidia with its products like the GeForce RTX 5080 ($999) and GeForce RTX 5090 ($1,999). Instead, the company focused on the performance-mainstream segment and currently offers Radeon RX 9070 at a $549 MSRP and Radeon RX 9070 XT at a $599 MSRP. At these prices, these are some of the best graphics cards on the market.

Without a doubt, AMD could easily sell more Radeon RX 9070-series graphics cards at $549–$599 (even with a 15%–20% markup in retail) in the first week than it did with the prior generation. Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX launched at $899–$999 in mid-December, 2022, and supplies weren't particularly large. When it comes to  Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT ($579–$649, launched mid-November, 2020) and Radeon RX 6900 XT ($999, early December, 2020), those products were launched amid the COVID-19 pandemic and are known for their low stock availability at launch; they sold out the first day.

As for AMD's 2019 products — the Radeon VII (Vega 20, early 2019) for $699, Radeon Vega Frontier Edition for $999–$1,499 (Vega 10, June, 2019), and Radeon RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 XT AE for $399–$499 (July, 2019) were also aimed at different market segments, but the company ramped them up (mostly the RDNA-based RX 5000-series) in a timely fashion in the subsequent quarters, so 2019 was quite a good year for AMD.

We can dig a little deeper into the past to observe the launches of AMD’s Vega (GCN 5), Polaris (GCN 4), Fiji (GCN 4), and other iterations of the GCN architecture originally introduced in 2011. But the graph based on data from JPR clearly indicates that AMD has consistently sold fewer graphics cards in their ‘halo GPU’ launch quarters (we did not include all GPUs in the graph) than in their previous cycles.

There were exceptions in 2016–2017, but mainly because AMD’s Radeon R9 Fury and Radeon 300-series GPUs failed to gain any significant popularity in 2015. The overall trend is that sales of AMD’s desktop GPUs are declining — a trend that reflects not only industry dynamics but also the company’s market share losses to Nvidia.

Could AMD reverse the trend and outsell not only the more expensive Radeon RX 6800/6900 and Radeon RX 7900-series graphics cards, but also its cheaper Radeon RX 400/500 and RX 5000-series with its Radeon RX 9070-series products in Q1 2025? To do so, AMD would need to sell over 4 million desktop discrete GPUs in the first quarter — something it has not done for years.

Has AMD managed to do beat the prior records with RDNA 4? We don't know yet. We'll need to wait and see when Jon Peddie Research releases it's Q1'25 discrete desktop GPU market share data in the coming weeks.

AMD is allegedly planning a successor to its Strix Point lineup of APUs for laptops, codenamed Gorgon Point per JNtechreview (via Harukaze). The reviewer shared several slides on their Naver Cafe channel from the LG Gram X Ryzen launch event that seems to be under embargo, revealing a previously unannounced APU family from AMD that reportedly targets a 2026 launch. There are also talks of a new AI Max series succeeding Strix Halo under the "Medusa" lineup. Even if the slides seem real, it's best to approach them with caution, as AMD has not officially confirmed these products.

Gorgon Point allegedly serves as a drop-in replacement for existing Strix Point designs, supporting the same FP8 package. There aren't many architectural changes, as Gorgon Point seemingly sticks with the same Zen 5/5c CPU cores, an RDNA 3.5-based integrated GPU, and an NPU based on XDNA 2. The entire lineup screams Strix Point Refresh, apart from a new Ryzen AI 3 addition, likely to be reserved for entry-level laptops.

Per the slides, AMD's mobile offerings will continue with Hawk Point (Ryzen 200) for mainstream devices, while on the premium end, Gorgon Point is expected to supersede Strix Point next year. Following a two-year cadence, we anticipate Zen 6 to launch sometime later in 2025. However, the slides mention no Zen 6-based APU (likely to be named Medusa Point) for 2025 or 2026, although we could be reading too much into what's essentially leaked information. As a side note, Intel's competing Panther Lake is slated for release later in 2025 and is expected to feature Cougar Cove and Darkmont cores alongside an integrated GPU based on Xe3 (Celestial).

Moving over to performance, and AMD's internal projections depict single-digit performance increments versus incumbent Strix Point APUs, if these slides are genuine. With the respective Ryzen AI 300 (Strix Point) APU at 15W as the baseline (100%), we've found that the most impressive wins land at just 5-6%, largely due to the faster clock speeds and improved binning.

It was expected for AMD to target Gorgon Point (Strix Point Refresh) for the mainstream market and a potential Medusa Point for premium notebooks next year, similar to how Ryzen 200 (Hawk Point Refresh) chips recently launched as an entry-level option. However, that doesn't seem to be the case, at least according to this leak.

Furthermore, the source also mentions that the successor to the beastly Strix Halo will be available under the Medusa series. AMD will probably incorporate its then-latest architectures, such as Zen 6 and RDNA 4 or the first iteration of UDNA, if we're lucky, with these chips. Sadly, an expected release window has not been specified, although we could be looking as far off as late 2026 or early 2027.

During a Q&A session with LG and AMD, it was supposedly mentioned that there are no plans to bring RDNA 4 discrete GPUs to laptops. This much was already said by AMD in broad terms previously, where it indicated RDNA 4 desktop GPUs are their first priority. All in all, there are still some gaps in AMD's next-generation mobile portfolio, though we're hopeful that time will bring more clarity.

Update: AMD reached out to Tom's Hardware to clarify that no claims about sales numbers were given at the event. There was discussion about strong demand for RX 9000 (and X3D), but the 200K claim was not a part of that conversation, according to AMD. The Benchlife page which seems to have been the original source of the claim has also been pulled.

AMD recently announced that its first run of 200,000 RX 9070-series GPUs has nearly sold out. According to BenchLife.info [machine translated], AMD made this claim during its Advancing AI summit recently held in Beijing, China, where it also talked about the recent release of its Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D chips.

The RDNA4 GPUs were highly anticipated, especially as Nvidia’s RTX 50 series GPUs were severely understocked. And while Team Red has had months to stockpile graphics cards at retailers, the unprecedented demand for the RX 9070 XT meant that supply was quickly cleared out by frustrated gamers.

Because of this, some stores and scalpers are taking advantage of the situation, selling 9000-series GPUs way over the MSRP. Even legitimate retailers have reportedly been selling base models at a 22% markup, with some attributing this to tariffs. Despite this, the RX 9070 is on track to become one of the best-selling GPUs of its time, with the graphics card already ranking on top of Amazon’s best-seller lists.

AMD hasn’t released any data to back up its 200K GPU claim, so we can't verify how accurate its sales claim is. But if it’s true, it means that Nvidia’s supply situation is way worse than we believe. After all, we can see this with the better availability of RX 9070 GPUs versus Nvidia’s 50-series.

Team Green has already admitted to a GPU shortage with its RTX 5090 and 5080 GPUs. However, even the mid-range RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 cards are nowhere to be found. Rumors have swirled that Nvidia supply should improve in the coming months, while an AMD AIB claims that GPU supply for AMD will stabilize by April. These reports likely pertain to chips being released to GPU manufacturers, so we'll likely have to wait for April to June before we see these new stocks arrive on store shelves.

While news like this may give us hope for an affordable latest-gen GPU that’s readily available, the way Nvidia has been treating gaming GPUs makes us inclined to not believe anything until we see stocks arrive. As for AMD, it now has the chance to claw back some market share from Nvidia if it can take advantage of the situation and deliver 9070-series stocks before Team Green ramps up deliveries and fills the market with 50-series GPUs.

It is not a secret that it is close to impossible to get a Radeon RX 9070-series graphics card at MSRP in the U.S., and apparently customers in China are suffering from the same problem. Yeston, which is a relatively small supplier of graphics add-in-boards (AIBs), admits that supply of AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs is unstable at this time, and says that it expects the situation to stabilize "after April"

"We have received a lot of messages and would love to inform you now the supply is unstable, but we will restock every week," a statement by Yeston posted on X reads. "Please do not be frustrated if you did not get it. The supply will continue stable to be available after April."

While the company does restock frequently, availability remains patchy. For example, Yeston makes announcements regarding exact availability time of its Radeon RX 9070 XT products (which are among the best graphics cards), which is a good indicator that availability is indeed scarce. To that end, buyers interested in securing one of these graphics cards should keep an eye on Yeston's official updates on X for the latest restock information.

It should be noted that Yeston is not a major maker of graphics cards and sells boards based on processors from both AMD and Nvidia, so it does not really get priority supplies from either of the big two GPU developers.

Although AMD stated earlier this month that the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics cards running at default clocks and without factory overclocking would be available at $549 and $599, actual retailers in the U.S. and UK increased prices by $50 to $130. As a result, there are almost no models available at MSRP. Reports suggest the situation might be worse than initially thought.

Stores like Micro Center, Newegg, and Overclockers U.K. have marked up Radeon RX 9070 XT prices by 11.7% to 21.7% in the U.S. and 14% to 17.4% in the U.K., while the vanilla Radeon RX 9070 is up 14.5% to 21.8% in the U.S. and 7.5% in the U.K. The entry-level models are supposed to follow AMD's pricing recommendation, yet only Best Buy and Micro Center list some at MSRP — though they are sold out.

TensorWave, a cloud-platform for AI workloads powered by AMD's MI Instinct accelerators, is kicking off the Beyond CUDA Summit starting today. The event focuses on the concept of the 'CUDA moat,' and how developers can optimize their AI-centric workloads using other alternatives. Attendees can expect to see demonstrations, hot takes, panels, and expert opinions from influential leaders in the AI field including computer architect icons like Jim Keller and Raja Koduri.

It's no secret that Nvidia-built GPUs constitute the majority of hardware in the AI space. Although AMD's Instinct accelerators offer performance comparable to Nvidia hardware, the already-established and mature CUDA ecosystem is indispensable to some users / organizations. Nvidia realized the potential of parallel computing on its GPUs early on and developed a proprietary platform dubbed CUDA, which is now the de facto standard for GPU-accelerated computing.

Through continuous efforts, optimizations, and the sudden rise of AI which coincidentally is powered by GPUs, Nvidia has positioned itself as a leading solution provider. In fact, 90% of Nvidia's revenue is now driven by its data-center offerings, with CUDA being a central selling point. This creates a vendor lock-in situation, where CUDA (software) effectively confines the industry to Nvidia's hardware, limiting innovation and competition.

The industry is shifting gears to a more open-source and hardware-agnostic future, but that's easier said than done. We have OpenCL, ROCm, oneAPI, and Vulkan as alternatives, however, each trails Nvidia in one or many aspects. Enter Beyond CUDA, where key figures in the AI field have rallied up to congregate and develop a more diverse and heterogeneous future. Hosted by TensorWave, the Beyond CUDA Summit will address the many challenges the AI computing industry faces, such as hardware flexibility, cost efficiency, and exploring the available alternatives to CUDA.

Platforms like ROCm require significant developments to achieve parity with CUDA. Even now, ROCm only supports a small selection of modern GPUs while CUDA maintains compatibility with hardware dating back to 2006. AMD's latest RDNA 4 GPUs are still not officially supported by ROCm. Developers have long bemoaned AMD's slow adoption of new features and support on new hardware. On the positive side, Strix Halo is now ROCm-compatible, though only on Windows.

If you live in San Jose, buckle up as the summit takes place at The Guildhouse, which is with notable irony just three blocks away from the McEnery Convention Center, the site of Nvidia's GTC, which also commences today. Participants have the opportunity to win an AMD Instinct MI210 GPU with 64GB of HBM2e memory. The event runs from 12 PM to 10 PM PDT, with four time slots for various sessions. You can learn more details about the summit here.

The Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT are among the best graphics cards. However, not all the usual vendors have embraced AMD's Radeon RX 9000-series (RDNA 4) lineup. MSI has confirmed that it chose to forgo this generation of AMD Radeon graphics cards.

We contacted MSI to determine if the company had plans to release any Radeon 9000-series graphics cards utilizing the RDNA 4 architecture. A company representative responded to Tom's Hardware, saying, "Regarding your question, MSI is not manufacturing AMD GPUs this generation."

The statement suggests that MSI's decision isn't restricted to the Radeon RX 9070 series that has recently come out of the oven. We infer that it encompasses RDNA 4 as a whole, considering MSI's use of the phrase "this generation." Whatever the core reasons, MSI isn't saying, and this doesn't mean there won't be future AMD-based graphics cards from the company. But for now, MSI doesn't plan to offer any RDNA 4-based graphics cards.

MSI Radeon Graphics Cards

If we analyze the last three generations of Radeon graphics cards, it's evident that MSI was a devoted AMD partner until the launch of the Radeon RX 7000-series (RDNA 3). For instance, the shift from the Radeon RX 5000-series (RDNA) to the Radeon RX 6000-series (RDNA 2) resulted in a 50% increase in the number of models available. However, you can argue that the Radeon RX 6000 refresh helped boost the numbers. Excluding the refreshed models would reduce the RDNA 2 total to 33 different models, still amounting to a 10% increase over RDNA.

Things took a turn for the worse with RDNA 3, as MSI offered only four custom models: one Radeon RX 7900 XTX, one Radeon RX 7900 XT, and two Radeon RX 7600. This marked a significant 91% decrease in models compared to RDNA 2. MSI even neglected to release custom models for other RDNA 3 SKUs, such as the Radeon RX 7800 XT, Radeon RX 7700 XT, or the Radeon RX 7600 XT.

While we didn't collect the data for Nvidia's GeForce graphics cards, it's not difficult to see that MSI clearly invests more effort in supporting the Green Team. A quick look at MSI's website shows that the last-generation RTX 4090, despite its eye-watering $1,599 price tag, was offered in 12 different variants, 3X more than the entire RDNA 3 lineup.

Is MSI turning into the new EVGA?

In a way, the writings were always on the wall that MSI could participate less in AMD's graphics card launches. MSI did not partner with AMD for a few product launches in the last generation, like the Radeon RX 7800 XT. The brand didn't put out any new designs but salvaged coolers from the previous generation. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX Gaming Trio Classic 24G utilized a recycled cooler that stemmed from the Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming Trio Plus 16G.

MSI did not specify why it isn't producing AMD RDNA 4 graphics cards, though we can speculate on several possible reasons.

One key thought is that MSI may want to become a premiere Nvidia partner to fill the void that EVGA has left behind. Skipping RDNA 4 means MSI can allocate all the company's resources toward the latest GeForce RTX 50-series (Blackwell) graphics cards and potentially receive better pricing or special incentives. According to the latest Steam Hardware and Software survey, Nvidia remains a dominant force in the graphics card market, with a usage share of 83.07% compared to AMD's 11.49% from September 2023 to February 2025.

Perhaps MSI's decision not to offer RDNA 4 graphics cards is related to demand. The company likely ran the numbers and determined that the ROI didn't warrant the brand's involvement this generation. That might seem difficult to understand, given the strong demand that has left the Radeon RX 9070 series nearly sold out worldwide, but that's all in hindsight. MSI likely made a decision on this a year or more in the past, when it wasn't clear that Nvidia supply would be lower than normal resulting in more demand for alternative options. It seems like a missed opportunity for MSI in retrospect.

We've also heard rumblings (not from MSI) that AMD didn't disclose its intended MSRPs for the 9070 series until that information was given in AMD's live presentation — that the AIB partners were simply supposed to assume that the recommended pricing would leave enough margin. If that's true, it's just one more reason for a partner to balk. Conversely, we also have Acer entering the U.S. market and elsewhere as an AMD (and Intel) GPU provider, potentially taking over MSI's former spot.

Whatever the case, MSI hasn't disclosed any plans for future AMD graphics cards. We'll have to wait and see if RDNA 5 (UDNA 1?) can persuade MSI to hop back on the AMD train, or if MSI ultimately transforms into the new EVGA.

David McAfee, AMD Vice President and General Manager over Client Channel Business, called the demand for AMD's newest GPU release "really unprecedented" this week. In an appearance on HotHardware's Thursday livestream, McAfee shared some details about what caused RX 9070 and RX 9070 XTs to sell out worldwide at blistering speed, and AMD's plans to get the cards into the hands of customers now and in the far future.

McAfee, who oversees much of AMD's consumer CPU and GPU businesses, was amazed by the success of the RX 9000-series' first wave. "The launch of RDNA 4 was really a milestone event for our graphics business. The demand was very, very, very strong all around the world," said the Radeon boss.

The AMD RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 hit the shelves on March 6th, heralding the beginning of AMD's "RDNA 4" GPU generation. Though the cards launched with a $599/$549 price tag, one week later it is near impossible to find the cards for this price, as all models of the cards across all of AMD's board partners are either sold out or being sold for as much as 22% over the MSRP from legitimate retailers.

McAfee explained in part why selling GPUs for appropriate prices and with ample stock can be a challenging game. "In [AMD's CPU business], we put a processor in a box, we set a price for that product, we ship it directly into the market, and we control that end-to-end."

In stark contrast to this, AMD's supply chain for selling GPUs involves a large number of AIB partners, which buy AMD's ASICs and build multiple models of each GPU, which models are then selected and ordered from by primary sellers.

"If you look at where we stand today, priority number one is restocking all of our partners," confirmed McAfee, then reiterating the lengthy process which stands between AMD shipping supply to partners and finished products hitting shelves. AMD is said to be intensely focusing on pushing Navi 48 into the hands of board partners/

McAfee and AMD affirm that when supply returns for RX 9070 XT, it will be accessible at the starting price point of $599. This echoes Frank Azor's pre-launch promise that RDNA 4's MSRP is not just launch-only pricing, but will persist throughout the lifespan of the cards.

This claim may fall on consumers' deaf ears, however; for the last several GPU generations, especially from Nvidia cards, GPU prices skyrocket immediately after launch and then never recovered. Nvidia RTX 4090 prices never settled back at or below MSRP for its entire lifespan, with the card now costing upwards of $3,000 even with the existence of the RTX 5090.

McAfee remains optimistic about RX 9070 XT's price settling down soon, however, and about the current state of AMD's consumer offerings. "As we refill the channel from what happened last week, you'll see more supply coming," claimed the Radeon boss. "Not just at the opening price points, but across the entire range as we look at the rest of this quarter, Q2, and beyond."

Ever since the launch of the Ryzen 9 9800X3D, AMD internally has apparently been riding hit after hit with pride. McAfee boldly proclaimed, "We think we've got the most compelling portfolio in the industry right now across the entire range", including notebooks, laptops, high-end desktops, enterprise use, and everything in between.

For those anxious to see AMD make a return to halo-tier top-end GPUs, more patience will be necessary. Per McAfee, the vast majority of consumers buy GPUs at sub-$700 price points. For AMD right now, building up broad appeal and brainspace is far more important.

"We have aspirations to cover the entire gamut of gaming solutions that are out there in the market, and maybe one day we'll get there. But for now, we're really focused on growing scale and deriving the developer relationships that come from having a bigger footprint in the graphics market."

With AMD snatching GPU market share away from Nvidia even in Q4 2024, and the launch of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D securely claiming AMD's top dog status for CPUs for any consumer use-case, the future is bright for AMD (thanks in no small part to the struggles of its competitors). What comes next? Hopefully affordable RX 9070 XTs.

Last week AMD promised that its Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards with default clocks and regular cooling systems should be available at recommended prices of $549 and $599. However, retailers in the U.S., U.K., and presumably elsewhere are now selling entry-level Radeon RX 9070-series models that are supposed to be selling at MSRPs at prices that are $50 to $130, according to The Verge. Our own research suggests things might be even more dire.

According to The Verge, major retailers in the U.S. and the U.K. including Micro Center, Newegg, and Overclockers U.K. have adjusted prices upward, with no models sold at MSRP currently in stock. As a result, AMD's Radeon 9070 XT experienced price increases of 11.7% to 21.7% in the U.S. ($70–$130) and 14% to 17.4% in the U.K. (£80–£100), while the vanilla Radeon 9070 saw increases of 14.5% to 21.8% in the U.S. ($70–$80) and 7.5% in the UK (£40). These boards are among the best graphics cards money can buy, but they are considerably more expensive than they should be.

The graphics cards in question come from ASRock, Gigabyte, PowerColor, Sapphire, and XFX. With the exception of Gigabyte, those companies are AMD's exclusive partners, do not sell any Nvidia-based add-in-boards (AIBs), and are expected to adhere to MSRP with their entry-level products. We are indeed talking about entry-level products that belong to PowerColor's Reaper, Sapphire's Pulse, and XFX's Swift series — all known for affordability rather than extra features and lighting.

Interestingly, Best Buy still lists XFX Swift and Gigabyte Gaming models at MSRP — Radeon RX 9070 XT at $599 and RX 9070 at $549 — but all four variants are currently sold out with no indication that they're likely to come back in stock. Micro Center also lists a few models at their original prices, but none are available.

Last week AMD said that multiple vendors would sell cards at launch prices, but it did not specify how many cards would be sold or how long they would last before prices might go up. The company also did not confirm which board partners or retailers would adhere to the MSRP if demand is high and supply is tight. 

The Verge notes that at least some U.S.-based retailers, including Best Buy, Newegg, and Micro Center, continue to list some of Nvidia's latest GeForce RTX 5070, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5080 graphics cards at MSRP (though they're also out of stock). It's unclear whether it is a matter of supply and demand balance for these products (at the end of the day, they are pretty expensive), or Nvidia and its partners have a policy to have at least some products sold at recommended prices.

Currently, looking at most major U.S. online stores, the best prices we can find are typically far above the base MSRPs. Best Buy has RTX 5070 cards priced at $649–$739 in stock, with one model laughably showing a "Save $30" notification. Everything else is out of stock. Asus currently shows an RX 9070 Prime for $659 in stock, if you're willing to pay that much and you act fast; it also show RTX 5070 Prime for $549, which likely won't last two seconds past the time we post this. Literally everything is out of stock at Newegg right now. Amazon has some items in stock, but many show up under "new sellers" — it's a risk to buy from such people, obviously. Outside of a few select places, then, even a 22% markup right now is probably better than you're likely to find online in the U.S.

AMD's 4th Generation FidelityFX Super Resolution image upscaling technology with frame generation is a very promising feature of the company's latest Radeon RX 9000-series, but for now it is officially supported by a limited number of games. Nonetheless, modders have found a way to add FSR 4 to any game that supports Nvidia's DLSS2 or newer or Intel's XeSS, reports VideoCardz.

To do so, they invented the OptiScaler app that can enable FSR 4 in all games supporting Intel's XeSS and/or Nvidia DLSS2 or newer machine learning-based upscaling technologies. Additionally, OptiScaler adds support for frame generation and anti-lag features, enhancing gaming performance in titles that for now lack these options officially. 

For obvious reasons, FSR 4 only works on AMD's Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics cards for now. FSR 4 does not work on older RDNA 3-based graphics cards, and attempting to enable it without the required ML-based upscaling hardware will hardly lead to any performance or quality improvements. In fact, this may well cause major stability issues. 

Beyond upscaling, OptiScaler also enables frame generation for games that do not natively support this feature. The program requires DirectX 12 and might need additional fixes, such as a HUD adjustment. Additionally, the tool can integrate Nvidia Reflex technology to reduce latency, using methods like FakeNvapi to enable Anti-Lag 2 or LatencyFlex support. 

The modder known as High Yield has provided a guide specifically detailing how to enable FSR4 in Cyberpunk 2077, helping users with the process and maximizing performance in one of the most demanding modern games. This addition is particularly valuable as Cyberpunk 2077's developer CD Project Red does not plan to add support for FSR 3.1 and FSR 4 to the title, so OptiScaler is the only tool that can add this technology to the game. 

Still, keep in mind that OptiScaler is a program that is not supported by AMD, Intel, or Nvidia. Furthermore, FSR4 support is said to be experimental, so there can be bugs, stability issues, and quality artifacts.

AMD RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT GPUs, which rival the best graphics cards, were launched on March 5, three days ago. The RDNA 4-powered graphics card is the second best-selling GPU on Amazon and has taken the first spot in Amazon Germany and Amazon UK. Remember that these standings are dynamic and are subject to change as consumers purchase more units of one graphics card than the other.

Despite the supply issues with the GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs, the RTX 5070 Ti has remained on top of Amazon's best-selling list. The MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16G Ventus 3X OC, launched at $829.99, appears to be the most popular model. The Asus TUF Gaming Radeon RX 9070 XT OC Edition is in second place.

Amazon Germany lists the XFX Swift Radeon RX 9070 OC White as its best-selling GPU, despite being listed for €929.99 — this is way above its $549 MSRP (around €506), even if you include taxes. On the other hand, the U.K.’s top bestseller is the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming OC, which is already unavailable at the time of this article.

Despite seemingly launching with more stock than Nvidia and Intel, AMD’s RX 9070 series GPUs quickly ran out within a few hours of its launch. Scalpers are now selling them for more than twice the MSRP, and it’s apparent that people still buy these mid-range cards despite scalpers selling them at high-end prices. While we expect that some 9070 models will be sold at a premium, AMD’s Frank Azor said that multiple cards from AIB partners will be sold at MSRP prices. However, the prices we see feel unreasonable, even for a more premium offering, especially as they now stray into RTX 5080 territory.

Hopefully, AMD will deliver more supplies in the coming weeks and help normalize the market. The GPU market has been fraught with shortages during the past few months. Intel launched its highly acclaimed Intel Arc B580 GPU late last year, but the graphics card stock is still hard to come by, even if you know where to buy it. Nvidia admitted a shortage of RTX 50-series GPUs, affecting everything from the RTX 5090 to its most affordable RTX 5070.

At the moment, we’re unsure if AMD’s shortage is temporary, having been caused by the pent-up demand for new GPUs caused by the wider community’s frustration with Nvidia and Intel. This is a big opportunity for Team Red, allowing it to claw back some market share from Nvidia, which has long dominated the gaming GPU market. We will know in the next few weeks if AMD can cope with the situation and produce enough cards to cover its competitors' shortfall.

Although there are plenty of AMD's Radeon RX 9070-series graphics cards on the market, many of them are sold at prices significantly higher than their recommended, $549 / $599, which naturally leaves many consumers and market observers frustrated. Hardware Unboxed accused AMD of setting unrealistically low recommended prices. However, AMD denies the accusations and says that graphics cards that adhere to default specifications will retail at recommended prices.

"It is inaccurate that $549/$599 MSRP is launch-only pricing," said Frank Azor, head of consumer and gaming marketing at AMD. "We expect cards to be available from multiple vendors at $549/$599 (excluding region-specific tariffs and/or taxes) based on the work we have done with our AIB partners, and more are coming.  At the same time, the AIBs have different premium configurations at higher price points and those will also continue."

When developers of graphics cards set manufacturer-suggested retail prices (MSRP), they consider the default specifications and bill of materials (BOM) cost of their reference designs. In most cases, MSRPs leave makers of graphics cards, distributors, retailers, and other participants of the supply chain a fair margin as companies like AMD and Nvidia do not want their partners to fail.

However, that margin is not always sufficient for manufacturers, as they tend to suffer from fluctuating prices of materials (e.g., copper foil) and components. Therefore, actual producers of graphics add-in-boards tend to do two things: produce lower-cost graphics cards or higher-end boards.

On the one hand, they try to lower the costs of graphics cards with default specifications by experimenting with BOM and components. Some of such graphics cards may retail even below MSRP (though not at launch week or month) and work just fine, thanks to the experience that companies like Asus or Sapphire have.

In the opposite direction, they use all their engineering might to build premium graphics cards with higher GPU clocks, enabled by advanced power supply circuitry, thicker printed circuit boards, sophisticated components, and even cherry-picked graphics processors for the crème-de-la-crème offerings. Such graphics cards will by definition be more expensive than those envisioned by GPU designers that tend to have a very clear segmentation for their offerings. As businesses, makers of graphics cards are inclined to sell premium products and therefore for now there are more Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics boards that sell at higher-than-MSRP prices than there are cards that sell at recommended prices.

Then of course therethe scalpers that can sell you a factory-overclocked Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card for over $2,000, which exceeds the recommended price of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090, which is substantially faster and therefore more future-proof at this price point.

AMD announced its latest RDNA 4 GPUs last week, with the cards on sale just a few days ago. The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 graphics cards deliver excellent value, and given that Team Red had weeks, if not months, to prepare for it, we expected these GPUs to have ample supply. Some retailers claimed they have thousands of RX 9070 XT GPUs of a single model in stock and are ready to sell come March 5.

However, it seems that the alleged good supply of AMD’s RDNA4 GPUs is not enough to satisfy the demands of gamers. We looked around major PC retailers like Micro Center and Newegg only to find almost all listings out of stock. Even Best Buy is mainly sold out, so even if you know where to buy AMD Radeon RX 9070 series GPUs, you’ll likely not find them available now.

On the other hand, when we checked listings for these GPUs on Amazon, we found some stores selling them at prices way beyond the MSRP of $549 and $599. For example, we saw a listing for an XFX Mercury RX 9070 XT OC Magnetic Air White Edition for $2,024.99 — more than three times the suggested retail price. We also saw an Asus TUG Gaming RX 9070 XT OC Edition selling for $1,795.00.

Note that major retailers or manufacturers don’t sell these items; instead, they’re offered by third-party shops with an online storefront on the e-commerce platform. Surprisingly, scalpers on eBay and Facebook Marketplace are a bit more reasonable, with many asking between $700 and $1,500 for an RX 9070 XT.

Of course, we are disappointed to see ‘Out of Stock’ signs again on GPU listings, with scalpers putting them up for sale at ridiculous prices. Intel launched the Arc B580 entry-level GPU to great acclaim late last year, but it’s still mostly out of stock even after several months. Nvidia has had it worse, admitting a GPU shortage for its 50-series GPUs.

We can hardly blame AMD for the situation, though, as it seems the company had more stock at launch than Nvidia or Intel ever had. It could be that the pent-up demand for mid-range GPUs that neither Team Blue nor Team Green could satisfy finally burst like a dam and gobbled up all available RDNA 4 GPUs.

Until these companies announce how many chips they’ve produced and poured into the market before a launch, we can’t explain why these shortages happen, especially as we’re already over the supply chain crisis caused by the 2019 global pandemic. But remember, no matter how excited you are for a new GPU, you should never purchase from these scalpers.

Introducing the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 are here, ushering in the RDNA 4 GPU architecture and RX 9000 series of graphics cards. AMD spilled the beans on the hardware and specs last week, and we've already done a deeper dive into what makes these new GPUs tick, but now it's time to see how the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 stand up to the best graphics cards — all while we wait to see what happens with the retail launch tomorrow and how quickly the supply disappears.

RDNA 4 represents a throwback to AMD architectures of years past, as the company is once again targeting mainstream performance and maybe even budget performance further down the road. But today, we're getting the $599 RX 9070 XT and $549 RX 9070 cards. And while some might feel cards at up to $600 don't qualify as "mainstream," in today's market, we'd say mainstream stretches from around $400 up to $600, while anything below about $300 is clearly in the budget range. The PC graphics card market has become much more expensive in the past decade.

The one question we can't answer is what retail availability will look like. It seems like the AIBs have been stockpiling cards for about two or three months now, but how quickly were they being supplied the requisite GPUs? We don't know. Maybe there are tens of thousands of 9070 series cards just waiting to go on sale tomorrow; maybe there are only a few thousand. What we do know is that if there aren't enough to meet demand, prices are going to head north, just as they did with the RTX 50-series launches of the past two months.

Speaking of which, the Nvidia RTX 5070 officially goes on sale this morning. Of course we knew the performance of the RX 9070 XT and 9070 when we posted that review yesterday. What we don't know — what no one outside of Nvidia and its distributors and retail partners knows — is how many 5070 cards will be available today.

The RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090 have all sold out almost immediately, and we've seen prices shoot up by 50% or more relative to the MSRPs.

Will the AMD graphics cards buck that trend or join the "party?" We'll find out in the coming days, but considering what happened with Intel's Arc B580, it's obvious that lower-priced cards aren't immune from the potential supply and demand problems.

Our default assumption right now, based on nearly all prior generation graphics cards already being sold out and/or overpriced — with only the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 still available at or near MSRP — is that RDNA 4 isn't going to be a magic bullet to solve the availability issues plaguing the graphics card market right now.

Let's also clear the air on the comparison GPUs in our charts. We've (or at least I've) been testing GPUs more or less constantly since the beginning of 2025. Drivers keep changing, certain tests that failed to run in the past have been fixed, bugs come and go, and we have a new GPU testbed and test suite. Ideally, we'd love to have every reasonable comparison present in the charts, but it will be a while before we have all the data compiled at a rate of a few GPUs getting tested per week.

So, the RTX 4070 Super wasn't tested for the 5070 review, not because we don't think it's important but because of time. Similarly, the RX 7900 GRE won't be in this review because we don't have time. Eventually, we'll get those tested, and all the data will be available in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy.

You should be able to reasonably estimate where those 'missing' cards would land, and as both of those were later additions to their respective GPU families, it seemed to make more sense to leave those out rather than some other GPUs.

All good? Good. Let's hit the specs.

The raw specs are interesting, but there's more to GPU performance than specs. For example, Intel's Arc B580 as an example has "worse" compute performance than the Arc A770: 14.6 TFLOPS versus 19.7 TFLOPS. But in actual benchmarks, the B580 is up to 17% faster across our gaming test suite at 1440p. Both AMD and Nvidia have also updated their core architectures to improve performance, and today we find out just how much.

The RX 9070 XT offers theoretical peak compute of 48.7 TFLOPS for FP32, which is used for graphics, and up to 1557 TOPS of INT4 AI compute (with sparsity). The previous generation RX 7900 XTX offers 61.4 TFLOPS of FP32, but only 122.8 TFLOPS of FP16 for AI workloads — or alternative 122.8 TOPS of INT8 compute. We'll spoil the surprise a bit by saying that, for a lot of games, the 7900 XTX is still faster... but in AI tasks and RT games, the tables can turn.

It's not just compute performance that matters, of course. Memory bandwidth and capacity are also factors. The 7900 XTX had a 384-bit interface and 24GB of VRAM, compared to the 9070 XT and 9070 with 256-bit interfaces and 16GB of VRAM. In all cases the memory is GDDR6 clocked at 20 Gbps, so the prior generation halo card had 50% more bandwidth and capacity.

There's also the RT accelerators. AMD's RDNA 4 has doubled the ray/triangle and ray/box intersection rates with RDNA 4 compared to RDNA 3, which means the 64 RT units in the 9070 XT should be the performance equivalent of 128 RDNA 3 RT units, but the 7900 XTX only has 96 RT accelerators. So that's potentially 33% higher ray tracing performance from the new generation.

As already noted, the prices on paper look good. What we don't know is whether prices will stay close to what AMD recommends, or if they'll get jacked up by the retail outlets and AIBs. Because AMD isn't making any graphics cards itself this round, it will be up to the add-in board (AIB) partners to determine prices on the various models.

There are probably requirements for each company to have an MSRP priced GPU, but we've seen those disappear in the past — or things like Asus's "special launch pricing" on some of its RTX 50-series cards.

We can also look at what graphics cards are available at retail. Last November, during the holiday shopping season, most graphics cards went on sale at prices below MSRP. And then they were gone. Now, virtually everything at the usual places for the U.S. — Newegg, Amazon, B&H, Best Buy, etc. — is either out of stock or seriously overpriced.

RX 7900 XTX was selling for as little as $819, now the best price we can find is $1,094 for a PSU and GPU combo, and after that the price jumps to $1,283 at Amazon.

The same pattern applies to pretty much every other GPU. Outside of the RTX 4060, RX 7600, and Arc B570, we can't find anything at MSRP, never mind below MSRP. If you want a mainstream or higher performance GPU, it's currently overpriced compared to just a month or two back. Given the scarcity of any graphics card with an MSRP above $400, then, it's hard to imagine the 9070 XT and 9070 will stay at MSRPs in the near term. But we'll wait and see.

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AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070, by PowerColor

AMD provided two graphics cards for this review, both from PowerColor and both with reference clocks. They're branded Reaper, a new family for PowerColor that presumably sits near the lower end of the product stack. These are triple-fan cards, but everything else says base model — no RGB lighting, no dual BIOS, no extras in the box. That's fine, as base MSRP cards usually don't have a lot of extras.

We're primarily focusing on the higher spec RX 9070 XT for this review, though we'll have all the performance data for both cards. It's again a matter of time constraints. Doing three full graphics card writeups in one week is just a bit too much. But we'll have plenty to say about the vanilla RX 9070 as well.

Both cards have the same physical dimensions: 292x111x41 mm. The fans are 88mm models with integrated rims that help improve airflow. But while the dimensions are the same, there are some differences between the two cards. Specifically, the 9070 XT card has a copper heat plate while the 9070 has an aluminum (or some silver metal) heat plate. There are likely other differences under the shrouds, as the 9070 XT will have to dissipate more heat.

PowerColor takes the traditional approach of including three DisplayPort 2.1a ports and a single HDMI 2.1b port. However, the specifications note that only two simultaneous DP2.1 connections can be active at the same time. Also, these are UHBR13.5 (54 Gbps) ports, rather than the full 80 Gbps maximum that DisplayPort 2.1a allows for.

The RX 9070 XT has a 304W TBP (Total Board Power), so it makes sense that it comes with dual 8-pin power connectors. Along with the 75W maximum power provided by the PCIe x16 slot — and yes, it's a PCIe 5.0 slot — that's up to 375W of power.

The 9070 only has a 220W TBP, so technically it could even be run off a single 8-pin connector plus the power from the PCIe slot, but taking the safer route of providing a second 8-pin connection is appreciated.

Of course, being the old and reliable 8-pin connectors means there shouldn't be much risk of any meltdowns happening, and you can get away with using pre-ATX 3.0 power supplies. Either way, these are minimalist designs that should work well in general. Which brings us to the important part for anyone reading: the benchmarks.

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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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• MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
• MORE: All Graphics Content

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 Rasterization Gaming Performance

We divide gaming performance into two categories: traditional rasterization games and ray-tracing games. We benchmark each game using four different test settings: 1080p medium, 1080p ultra, 1440p ultra, and 4K ultra.

Like the RTX 5070, we'd rate the 1440p ultra results as the most important here, though arguably the 9070 XT can also target 4K. So, we'll go ahead and just sort each grouping from highest to lowest resolution/setting.

Do note that 1440p also correlates with 4K using quality mode upscaling, though there's some overhead for the algorithms, and 1080p likewise correlates with 4K using performance mode upscaling.

The interesting thing here is going to be seeing how the two 9070-series cards compete with each other as well as with Nvidia's RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti. The latter has a much higher $749 MSPR, and it's currently selling at $1,149 and up. Even if the 9070 XT can't quite catch the 5070 Ti, if it can come close while also staying closer to its $599 MSRP, it would represent a serious coup.

We'll start with the rasterization suite of 16 games, as that's arguably still the most useful measurement of gaming performance. Plenty of games that have ray tracing support end up running so poorly that it's more of a feature checkbox than something useful.

We'll provide limited to no commentary on most of the individual game charts, letting the numbers speak for themselves. The Geomean charts will be the main focus, since those provide the big picture overview of where the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 land relative to the other GPUs.

There are several important comparisons we want to look at. First is how the fastest RDNA 4 GPU, the 9070 XT, fares against the 7900 XTX. The answer: It's probably closer than you would expect based on the raw specs.

The 7900 XTX ends up winning by just 5% overall at 4K — and also 5% at 1440p and 1080p ultra, with a slightly lesser 3% lead at 1080p medium, where CPU bottlenecks become a bigger factor. The 9070 XT is also consistently 5~10 percent faster than the RX 7900 XT, so that's higher performance than the prior generation's nominally $750 part with a price of $600.

Next up, let's look at the 9070 XT versus 9070. The XT costs just $50 more, a 9% price increase, with a theoretical 35% advantage in raw compute. Except that raw compute assumes the GPUs are running at their boost clocks, and that's not always the case. The vanilla 9070 tends to exceed its boost clock in many of our tests, particularly at lower resolutions... but the same goes for the 9070 XT.

Overall, the XT leads by 15% at 4K, 13% at 1440p, and 10%/8% at 1080p ultra/medium. That means that, as many surmised before today's review embargo, the RX 9070 XT is the better value.

But what a lot of people really want to know is how the AMD versus Nvidia matchup shakes out. Based on MSRPs, the RTX 5070 Ti should be the fastest of the new cards, and it is. However, the margin of victory isn't very large at all, considering the $150 price difference. We're talking low single digit percentages for our rasterization tests: 0 to 4 percent across our suite, with the biggest lead of 4% coming at 1080p ultra.

That's pretty surprising, considering the 5070 Ti has 40% more memory bandwidth thanks to GDDR7.

That of course means the matchup between the RX 9070 XT and the RTX 5070 ends up being a relative blowout. For $50 more — on paper — the RX 9070 XT beats the RTX 5070 by 29% at 4K, 21% at 1440p, and 14–15 percent at 1080p. It's not even close.

There's only one game in our rasterization suite that the 5070 wins by a decent amount at 1080p, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, which seems to be lacking in the AMD driver optimizations arena — and the 9070 XT is still 11% faster at 4K ultra.

And finally, what about the RX 9070 versus the RTX 5070, both nominally priced at $549? If you're at all good at math and were paying attention above, you'll already know that the 9070 comes out ahead. It's 12% faster at 4K, 8% faster at 1440p, and 4%/7% faster at 1080p.

There are five games where the 5070 manages any lead at all, with Space Marine 2 being the biggest margin of victory and the only one where the 5070 leads at 4K. In general, though, the RX 9070 is clearly better for rasterization performance at native resolution.

Below are the 16 rasterization game results, in alphabetical order, with short notes on the testing where something worth pointing out is present.

Assassin's Creed Mirage uses the Ubisoft Anvil engine and DirectX 12. It's also an AMD-promoted game, though these days, that doesn't necessarily mean it always runs better on AMD GPUs. It could be CPU optimizations for Ryzen, or more often, it just means a game has FSR2 or FSR3 support — FSR2 in this case. It also supports DLSS and XeSS upscaling.

Baldur's Gate 3 is our sole DirectX 11 holdout — it also supports Vulkan, but that performed worse on the GPUs we checked, so we opted to stick with DX11. Built on Larian Studios' Divinity Engine, it's a top-down perspective game, which is a nice change of pace from the many first-person games in our test suite. The faster GPUs are hitting CPU bottlenecks in this game.

Black Myth: Wukong is one of the newer games in our test suite. Built on Unreal Engine 5, which supports full ray tracing as a high-end option, we opted to test using pure rasterization mode. Full RT may look a bit nicer, but the performance hit is quite severe. (Check our linked article for our initial launch benchmarks if you want to see how it runs with full RT enabled. We've got supplemental testing coming as well.)

Dragon Age: The Veilguard uses the Frostbite engine and runs via the DX12 API. It's one of the newest games in my test suite, having launched this past Halloween. It's been received quite well, though, and in terms of visuals, I'd put it right up there with Unreal Engine 5 games — without some of the LOD pop-in that happens so frequently with UE5.

Final Fantasy XVI came out for the PS5 last year, but it only recently saw a Windows release. It's also either incredibly demanding or quite poorly optimized (or both), but it does tend to be very GPU limited. Our test sequence consists of running a set path around the town of Lost Wing.

We've been using Flight Simulator 2020 for several years, and there's a new release below. But it's so new that we also wanted to keep the original around a bit longer as a point of reference. We've switched to using the 'beta' (eternal beta) DX12 path for our testing now, as it's required for DLSS frame generation, even if it runs a bit slower on Nvidia GPUs.

Flight Simulator 2024 is the latest release of the storied franchise, and it's even more demanding than the above 2020 release — with some differences in what sort of hardware it seems to like best. Where the 2020 version really appreciated AMD's X3D processors, the 2024 release tends to be more forgiving to Intel CPUs, thanks to improved DirectX 12 code (DX11 is no longer supported).

God of War Ragnarök released for the PlayStation two years ago and only recently saw a Windows version. It's AMD promoted, but it also supports DLSS and XeSS alongside FSR3. We run around the village of Svartalfheim, which is one of the most demanding areas in the game that we've encountered.

Hogwarts Legacy came out in early 2023 and it uses Unreal Engine 4. Like so many Unreal Engine games, it can look quite nice but also has some performance issues with certain settings. Ray tracing, in particular, can bloat memory use, tank framerates, and also causes hitching, so we've opted to test without ray tracing. (At maximum RT settings, the 9800X3D CPU ends up getting only around 60 FPS, even at 1080p with upscaling!) We may replace this one in the coming days.

Horizon Forbidden West is another two years old PlayStation port, using the Decima engine. The graphics are good, though I've heard at least a few people think it looks worse than its predecessor — excessive blurriness being a key complaint. But after using Horizon Zero Dawn for a few years, it felt like a good time to replace it.

The Last of Us, Part 1 is another PlayStation port, though it's been out on PC for about 20 months now. It's also an AMD-promoted game and really hits the VRAM hard at higher-quality settings. Cards with 12GB or more memory usually do fine, and the RTX 5070 lands about where expected.

A Plague Tale: Requiem uses the Zouna engine and runs on the DirectX 12 API. It's an Nvidia-promoted game that supports DLSS 3, but neither FSR nor XeSS. (It was one of the first DLSS 3-enabled games as well.) It has RT effects, but only for shadows, so it doesn't really improve the look of the game and tanks performance.

Stalker 2 is another Unreal Engine 5 game, but without any hardware ray tracing support — the Lumen engine also does "software RT" that's basically just fancy rasterization as far as the visuals are concerned, though it's still quite taxing. VRAM can also be a serious problem when trying to run the epic preset, with 8GB cards struggling at most resolutions.

There's also quite a bit of microstuttering in Stalker 2, and it tends to be more CPU limited than other recent games.

Star Wars Outlaws uses the Snowdrop engine, and we wanted to include a mix of options. It also has a bunch of RT options that we leave off four our tests. As with several other games, turning on maximum RT settings in Outlaws tends to result in a less than ideal gaming experience, with a lot of stuttering and hitching even on the fastest cards.

Starfield uses the Creation Engine 2, an updated engine from Bethesda, where the previous release powered the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games. It's another fairly demanding game, and we run around the city of Akila, one of the more taxing locations in the game. It's a bit more CPU limited, particularly at lower resolutions.

Wrapping things up, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is yet another AMD-promoted game. It runs on the Swarm engine and uses DirectX 12, without any support for ray tracing hardware.

We use a sequence from the introduction, which is generally less demanding than the various missions you get to later in the game but has the advantage of being repeatable and not having enemies everywhere. Curiously, the RTX 40-series cards are able to hit much higher performance at 1080p than the 50-series and AMD cards.

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AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 Ray Tracing Gaming Performance

Ray tracing can be extremely demanding, and it's traditionally been a weak point for AMD's GPUs. However, the RDNA 4 architecture promises improved RT performance, so now we get to see how it actually fares. AMD even said the 9070 XT should beat the previous generation RX 7900 XTX in RT performance, which means it should be fairly competitive with the 5070 at least.

We're running native rendering for our tests, which is more than most GPUs can handle at 4K in particular. The RTX 5090 and perhaps 4090 can manage that, but mainstream GPUs? Not so much.

The more demanding RT games are usually better optimized for Nvidia GPUs, and often Nvidia promoted. That's no surprise as Nvidia has been pushing the tech far more than AMD or Intel. We've selected six reasonably demanding RT games for our testing, and we'll add additional supplemental RT / full RT / upscaling / framegen testing on the next page (in the future).

Again, there are multiple interesting comparisons. New AMD versus old AMD, the 9070 XT delivers 10–12 percent higher performance on average across our test resolutions compared to the RX 7900 XTX. Only Avatar — a lighter RT game as far as graphics effects go — runs faster on the XTX card. Elsewhere, Cyberpunk 2077 runs around 25% faster on the 9070 XT. And relative to the 7900 XT, the 9070 XT is 22–32 percent faster.

Looking at the two 9070-series cards, the 9070 XT gets a slightly larger lead in ray tracing than it did in rasterization performance. It's 12–19 percent faster, so again, for 9% more money it's the clearly better option. That's assuming MSRPs have any real meaning, of course.

So, AMD has clearly improved its ray tracing performance compared to RDNA 3, by quite a lot. 64 RT accelerators in the 9070 XT outperform 96 previous gen RT accelerators in the 7900 XTX. But is that enough to compete with Nvidia's cards?

The 9070 XT doesn't quite manage to take down the RTX 5070 Ti, but it's closer than we've seen in the past. It's 13% slower at 4K, 9% slower at 1440p, and 11% slower at 1080p medium — and nearly tied at 1080p ultra, but that's because Nvidia's 50-series has issues with Minecraft at 1080p "ultra."

But while AMD couldn't take down the higher tier 5070 Ti, the RTX 5070 is a different matter. Nvidia's new mainstream card does get slightly higher performance in Minecraft (except at 1080p ultra where performance on Nvidia is again terrible), but everywhere else the 9070 XT gets a clear win. It's 16–20 percent faster overall at our ultra settings, and 10% faster at 1080p medium. For a potential 9% increase in price, it's again the clear winner — though obviously DLSS and other software are still factors to consider.

And finally, we have the RX 9070 versus RTX 5070. AMD got the win in rasterization performance while Nvidia gets a slight win here. And we do mean slight. The 9070 is 4% slower at 1080p medium, only 1% slower at 1440p and 4K — likely thanks to having 16GB — and 5% faster at 1080p ultra where Nvidia's poor Minecraft result still skews the numbers.

Combining all 22 game results into a single chart, the RX 9070 XT is basically tied in overall performance with the RX 7900 XTX, and 10–17 percent faster than the RX 7900 XT. Not surprisingly, since they're using the same architecture, the gap between the 9070 XT and 9070 cards remains pretty consistent, with the XT being 9–16 percent faster overall.

If it hasn't been abundantly clear already, the 9070 XT is the obviously the better choice based on performance and MSRP.

Against Nvidia, the RX 9070 XT ultimately ends up slightly slower than the RTX 5070 Ti overall. It loses by 5% at 4K, 4% at 1440p, and 3% at 1080p. But again, on paper, it's 20% cheaper, so that's not a bad tradeoff. Naturally, that means the 9070 XT gets a big win over the vanilla 5070. The 9070 XT is 9–16 percent faster than the 5070, with a larger lead at the higher resolutions.

The RX 9070 ends up a lot closer to its direct competitor. It gets the win, but not by a huge margin: 4% at 1080p, 5% at 1440p, and 8% at 4K. And at that point, barring major differences in real-world pricing, it's close enough that the extras on offer from Nvidia like DLSS, Broadcast, etc. could sway the choice. Still, you do get 33% more VRAM with AMD's card.

The individual RT gaming charts follow, again with limited commentary on each.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora uses ray tracing, but it's not particularly forthcoming on when and where it's used. Reflections, in general, don't appear to use RT, which is one of the most noticeable upgrades RT can provide. Instead, it's used for shadows and possibly global illumination and some other effects.

What I can say for sure is that nothing in the menus (other than "BVH Quality") directly mentions ray tracing, and the performance hit doesn't seem to be as severe as in some games. Still, since there's RT of some form, this one gets lumped into our DXR suite.

If you want a game where ray tracing is both clearly visible and actually makes the game look better, without totally destroying performance, look no further than Control. It's now five years old, and we're using the Ultimate version, but it's still arguably the best example of using RT well.

And probably a lot of that is because you're running around the Federal Bureau of Control, an office space of sorts that has good reasons to have plenty of glass windows that reflect the scenery.

Note that Nvidia's RTX 50-series GPUs have some rendering errors in Control right now, and there's a hard 240 FPS cap that can impact the 1080p results. (This game is on the chopping block if I decide I want to trim down the number of tests I'm running.)

Possibly the most hyped-up use of RT in a game, Cyberpunk 2077 launched with more RT effects than other games of its era, and later, the 2.0 version added full path tracing and DLSS 3.5 ray reconstruction. Ray reconstruction ends up looking the best but only works on Nvidia GPUs, so, as with upscaling, it can be a case of trying to compare apples and oranges.

We're using medium settings with RT lighting at medium and RT reflections enabled, and then the step up uses the RT-Ultra preset. In all cases, any form of upscaling or frame generation gets turned off. However, we'll have more details on Cyberpunk 2077 with RT-Overdrive on the next page (eventually).

F1 24 enables several RT effects on the ultra preset but leaves them off on medium. But then 1080p medium runs at hundreds of frames per second, so we went ahead and turned all the RT effects on for our testing. We use the Great Britain track for testing.

Minecraft supports full path tracing, as well as DLSS 2 upscaling on RTX cards. We don't enable DLSS, and the game doesn't even allow it on the RTX 50-series GPUs right now. Apparently, it has some sort of hard-coded check for an RTX 20-, 30-, or 40-series GPU is our best guess. Or it's just a driver bug of some form.

The 50-series GPUs also underperform in Minecraft, especially at 1080p and less so at 1440p and 4K (the 'medium' results are mostly okay). Nvidia is aware of the problem and presumably working on a fix, but we've been saying that for over a month now.

Last on our list of RT-enabled games, Spider-Man: Miles Morales doesn't look as nice with RT turned on as the previous Spider-Man: Remastered. The reflections are less obvious, and perhaps performance is better as a result. But beyond the RT effects, maxing out the settings in Miles Morales definitely needs more than 8GB of VRAM, and even 12GB cards can struggle at times.

One final ray tracing benchmark we have is the 3DMark DXR Feature Test, where we report the average FPS rather than the calculated score. This is similar to full RT in a game, only done via a standalone benchmark and perhaps in a more vendor-agnostic fashion. Nvidia has also fixed a bug here that was causing Blackwell 50-series GPUs to underperform.

Interestingly, in the "pure" RT performance of 3DMark's DXR Feature Test, the 7900 XTX still comes out slightly ahead of the 9070 XT. The RTX 5070 also comes out ahead of the 7900 XTX. So, if the hope was that this would be a more neutral view of ray tracing potential, it doesn't quite show what we expected to see.

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AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 Full RT and FSR 4 Testing (Coming later...)

As we've said in other recent reviews, there's a lot of other testing we want to conduct, but we've been short on time for the past month or more it feels like. AMD has some games already available with FSR 4 support, and Nvidia has games with DLSS 4 support, but doing the additional testing for all of that can be a massive time sink and we just don't have the time right now.

We'll certainly be revisiting this subject in the coming days, and we'll update this page when we've got some hard data. For now, just know that FSR 4 is something we intend to investigate, sooner than later. We'll discuss things in more detail once we have some actual numbers.

More to come....

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 Content Creation, Professional Apps, and AI

Modern GPUs like the RX 9070 XT aren't just about gaming. They're used for video encoding and professional applications, and increasingly, they're being used for AI. We've revamped our professional and AI test suite to give a more detailed look at the various GPUs. We'll start with the AI benchmarks, as those tend to be more important for a wider range of users.

Procyon has multiple AI tests, and we've run the AI Vision benchmark along with two different Stable Diffusion image generation tests. The tests have several variants available that are all determined to be roughly equivalent (in output) by UL: OpenVINO (Intel), TensorRT (Nvidia), and DirectML (potentially for everything, but mostly for AMD). There are also options for FP32, FP16, and INT8 data types on some of the tests, which can give different results. We tested the available options and used the best result for each GPU.

Procyon has finally received the necessary update to run the TensorRT workloads on Blackwell 50-series GPUs, which wasn't the case for the 5090, 5080, and 5070 Ti reviews. Those same updates also improved the AI Vision performance for Nvidia's RTX 40-series cards, but the Stable Diffusion results remained about the same.

With the updates in place, Nvidia pretty much clobbers AMD. Even the RTX 4070 outperforms the 9070 XT in SDXL, though AMD does come out ahead in SD 1.5. And in the AI Vision tests, the gap is even worse. The 4070 is 71% faster than the 9070 XT, while the 5070 more than doubles its performance.

If there's a bright spot here, it's that AMD's new 9070 cards do outperform the prior generation AMD GPUs. It's also worth pointing out that Nvidia and Intel GPUs get a performance boost by using integers rather than floating point in the AI Vision test, but AMD doesn't get good performance from integer mode when using ONNX. It defaults back to the GPU shaders rather than running integer computations on the AI accelerators, which clearly doesn't help AMD's standings in this particular task.

ML Commons' MLPerf Client 0.5 test suite does AI text generation in response to a variety of inputs. There are four different tests, all using the LLaMa 2 7B model, and the benchmark measures the time to first token (how fast a response starts appearing) and the tokens per second after the first token. These are combined using a geometric mean for the overall scores, which we report here.

While AMD, Intel, and Nvidia are all ML Commons partners and were involved with creating and validating the benchmark, it doesn't seem to be quite as vendor-agnostic as we would like. AMD and Nvidia GPUs only have a DirectML execution path, while Intel has both DirectML and OpenVINO as options. Intel's Arc GPUs score quite a bit higher with OpenVINO than with DirectML.

The 9070 series cards only do slightly better than the 7000-series GPUs in time to first token, while the tokens per second results are a lot closer than in some of the other benchmarks. It's not clear exactly why that is, but the 9070 cards also come in below the 7900 XT in tokens per second, so there's likely plenty of room for improvement here.

We'll have some additional SPECworkstation 4.0 results below, but there's an AI inference test composed of ResNet50 and SuperResolution workloads that runs on GPUs (and potentially NPUs, though we haven't tested that). We calculate the geometric mean of the four results given in inferences per second, which isn't an official SPEC score but it's more useful for our purposes.

The RX 9070 and 9070 XT results were odd here, with the 9070 outperforming the 9070 XT. We'll have to look into retesting; perhaps we inadvertently swapped the numbers when recording the results. But the 9070 ends up on par with the RTX 5070, so we'd expect the 9070 XT to rank a lot higher.

For our professional application tests, we'll start with Blender Benchmark 4.3.0, which has support for Nvidia Optix, Intel OneAPI, and AMD HIP libraries. Those aren't necessarily equivalent in terms of the level of optimizations, but each represents the fastest way to run Blender on a particular GPU at present.

We need to note here that the 9070 cards couldn't run Blender Benchmark right now. Instead, we needed to get a special build of Blender 4.4.0, the full application, that supported the RDNA 4 GPUs. It doesn't appear to have inflated the new AMD GPU results, which end up being slightly ahead of the 7900 XTX and 7900 XT for the two newcomers. Nvidia meanwhile beats AMD's fastest card with the 4070 and above.

SPECworkstation 4.0 has two other test suites that are of interest in terms of GPU performance. The first is the video transcoding test using HandBrake, a measure of the video engines on the different GPUs and something that can be useful for content creation work. We use the average of the 4K to 4K and 4K to 1080p scores. Note that this only evaluates speed of encoding, not image fidelity.

AMD has improved its video encoding hardware with RDNA 4, so our previous GPU encoding tests that showed AMD with significantly lower image fidelity are no longer up to date — particularly with regards to the 9070 cards. But performance has also improved, with the 9070 cards basically tied for maximum performance.

Our final professional app tests consist of SPECworkstation 4.0's viewport graphics suite. This is basically the same tests as SPECviewperf 2020, only updated to the latest versions. (Also, Siemen's NX isn't part of the suite.) There are seven individual application tests, and we've combined the scores from each into an unofficial overall score using a geometric mean.

AMD's drivers for its consumer cards tend to be more friendly toward these professional applications, and the 9070 series doesn't alter that. Instead, AMD improves its standings slightly, with the 9070 XT taking the top spot, just ahead of the 7900 XTX. The 9070 ends up slightly behind the XTX, in third place overall.

These AI and professional tests are ultimately just one aspect of GPU performance, and if you only care about gaming they shouldn't exert much influence on your choice of GPU. That's especially true of the professional tests. AI could become something useful even for gaming, maybe, but higher Blender performance will only matter if you're actually using Blender for 3D modeling.

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AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 Power, Clocks, Temps, and Noise

All our gaming tests are conducted using an Nvidia PCAT v2 device, which allows us to capture total graphics card power, GPU clocks, GPU temperatures, and some other data as we run each gaming benchmark. We have separate 1080p, 1440p, and 4K results for each area, which we'll order from highest to lowest resolution for these tests.

AMD's power requirements were a lot higher than Nvidia with the prior generation, but with RDNA 4 and Blackwell the two companies are more or less on the same process node — N4P for AMD and 4N for Nvidia. The 9070 XT has a 304W TBP and comes in slightly below that mark at 4K, while the 9070 has a 220W TBP and is basically right on target.

Dropping down to lower resolutions and settings reduces power draw on all the cards, and the net result is that the 9070 generally uses less power than the 5070 — they're basically tied at 1080p, while AMD proves to be more efficient by using less power at 1440p and 4K.

The 9070 XT meanwhile ends up using more power across the test suite compared to the 5070 Ti. That's interesting, as Nvidia uses more power with the 5070 relative to the 9070, while the 5070 Ti offers more performance than the 9070 XT while drawing less power.

Clock speeds among the different GPUs and architectures aren't super important, but it's interesting to see where things land. AMD has increased clock speeds on average compared to RDNA 3, with the 9070 XT at times breaking the 3.0 GHz barrier even at stock settings. It does fall off the pace a bit at 4K, basically tied with the 5070 Ti, but it's over 2.9 GHz at all the lower resolutions.

For the RX 9070, it exceeds its rated boost clock at 1440p and 1080p but falls below 2.5 GHz at 4K. Power limits appear to be a significant limiting factor in performance at 4K for the card, so manually overclock could end up being quite beneficial.

Like the clock speeds, comparing GPU temperatures without considering other aspects of the cards doesn't make much sense. One card might run its fans at higher RPMs, generating more noise while being "cooler." So these graphs should be used alongside the noise and performance results.

AMD doesn't make reference 9070 cards, so the results here are a reflection of the GPUs to a certain degree, but really they're more an indication of how the PowerColor Reaper cards run. And they do a lot better than the 5070 Founders Edition, considering it's one of the hotter running cards.

But we also need to look at noise levels...

We check noise levels using an SPL (sound pressure level) meter placed 10cm from the card, with the mic aimed right at the center of one fan: the center fan if there are three fans, or the right fan for two fans. This helps minimize the impact of other noise sources, like the fans on the CPU cooler. The new noise floor of our test environment and equipment is around 34 dB(A), due to the noise from the CPU cooling pump.

Even more impressive than the thermals on the PowerColor cards is their noise levels. Only the RTX 4070 ended up being quieter than the 9070 XT, but it also ran quite a bit warmer. Not that any of these cards are really running hot, but it does show that traditional cooler designs with triple fans are still very capable.

Here's the full table of testing results, with FPS/$ calculated using the various launch MSRPs for the cards. That's because current retail prices are all wildly inflated, and many of the previous generation GPUs are now discontinued. We can only hope prices on the latest generation cards actually manage to reach MSRPs at some point. (Wishful thinking, perhaps.) Latency results are included for some of the games as well, and you can see the game-by-game power figures.

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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.

• MORE: Best Graphics Cards
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• MORE: All Graphics Content

AMD has announced that its upcoming RX 9070 series (RDNA 4) GPUs will require a UEFI system for optimal compatibility. Put simply, it has dropped support for the older BIOS and CSM standards, requiring users to make the necessary shift to UEFI. While this doesn't mean RDNA 4 GPUs will cease to function with legacy firmware, AMD offers no assurance.

Colloquial use has employed BIOS as a blanket term for all sorts of motherboard firmwares, including UEFI. BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System and contains essential instructions that allow your PC to initialize hardware, perform the Power-On-Self-Test and load the Operating System from storage. As the years followed, BIOS was superseded by UEFI which offers a GUI, Secure Boot and can support drives larger than 2.2TB. Notably, UEFI retains the core functionality of BIOS, just sprinkled with a pinch of modern features.

UEFI offers a feature dubbed CSM (Compatibility Support Module) that allows it to emulate a BIOS environment to maintain compatibility with older hardware. Lucky for us, modern CPUs (post Intel's Nehalem architecture) and motherboards are designed with UEFI support in mind. In most cases, the limiting factor is how your drive is partitioned; if it's using the MBR scheme, you'll need to convert it to GPT, necessary for UEFI.

In a new resource article, AMD has outlined the advantages UEFI has over legacy firmware. AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs will exclusively support UEFI systems, as it has dropped support for older CSM/Legacy Modes. So if you were planning to grab an RX 9070-series GPU this week, best make sure your system is running UEFI.

Let's make one thing clear, this does not mean that RDNA 4 (and future) GPUs will not boot on older systems. AMD simply does not guarantee an optimal experience, stating that your GPU could be missing out on necessary features such as Smart Access Memory. It doesn't make sense to invest in a $600 GPU if you're not going to realize its true potential. Plus, you might just get hit with unexplained BSODs and other compatibility problems.

The article contains further details on how you can smoothly transition between BIOS and UEFI. We'll go over the steps briefly: Ensure your storage device is partitioned using the GPT scheme. Afterward, enter the UEFI menu at startup. Navigate to the "Boot" menu then locate and disable the "CSM" or "Compatibility Support Module" option. Since most systems are UEFI-compatible, AMD is just stating the obvious to make sure every user has a streamlined and consistent experience.

We finally have some reputable data about the expected performance penalty for Nvidia's defective RTX 50 series GPUs, thanks to Gamers Nexus. The YouTube channel's Steve Burke put up a bounty for Blackwell cards with missing ROPs. Burke offered a $500 bonus on top of the price on the receipt while covering both shipping and taxes. He successfully managed to procure a defective RTX 5080 Founders Edition in exchange for a Zotac equivalent with all its ROPs operational.

In its original statement, Nvidia confirmed that only 0.5% of produced RTX 5090s and RTX 5070 Tis had been affected by the missing ROPs issue. This assertion would be short-lived, as just two days later, we found an RTX 5080 with a similar defect; it had 104 ROPs instead of the advertised 112. In synthetics, based on user-testing, the nerfed RTX 5080 scored 12% lower than what you'd normally expect. TechPowerUp's results were the only estimate of the performance delta in gaming benchmarks before these Gamers Nexus tests. The RTX 5070 should not be subject to similar problems. Even if defective chips were produced, let's hope AIBs and Nvidia can manage to keep them out of consumer hands.

Nvidia reported an on-average 4% difference in graphical performance if a GPU had missing ROPs. In the handful of games Burke tested, simple bad luck could land you up-to 11% behind other RTX 5080 users, as shown in Total War: Warhammer 3 at 4K. Moving over to the 1440p results, the gap closes somewhat as most games are within 3-4%, with a maximum variation of 8.8% in Dying Light 2 Stay Human. The data indicates that higher resolutions are generally more taxing on the ROP units.

When compared against other GPUs in the same ballpark, in the worst-case scenario, the defective RTX 5080 falls to RTX 5070 Ti levels, which invalidates the $250 price gap between the two. Of course, these results are game-dependent, so these outcomes aren't universal.

The best resolution from Nvidia is to create a driver-level identifier to alarm users if their RTX 50 GPU is missing ROP units. This is because the average consumer likely doesn't use third-party hardware monitoring utilities like GPU-Z and HWiNFO. Even if partners are offering replacements and refunds, supply constraints could keep you waiting for days, if not weeks for a new graphics card.

On the bright side, faulty RTX 5080s, before PCB assembly, could be repurposed by Nvidia (through software) as RTX 5070 Tis, in the future. A BIOS reflash could potentially restore these special units to RTX 5080 specs, unless Nvidia scraps these dies.

Yesterday, it was reported that AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs will not get ROCm support at launch. Unsurprisingly, this upset many developers who were planning to upgrade their setups and hoped for a seamless transition. However, ROCm support might not be far behind the launch, as AMD's Vice President of AI Software has teased what appears to be an AMD GPU from the RX 9070 series running in a dedicated ROCm environment.

ROCm is an open-source software stack for GPU programming, enabling graphics cards to be used for much more than rendering graphics. ROCm enables select GPUs to power HPC and AI applications, including professional Instinct Accelerators, prosumer Radeon PRO GPUs, and a handful of consumer-grade Radeon GPUs as well.

It seemed lacking for AMD to miss out on the opportunity of providing day-one support to developers. Ironically, the initial traces of Navi 48, the chip beneath RX 9070 GPUs, surfaced in ROCm updates last year. Anush Elangovan reported that RDNA 4 is "ROCm'ing on just fine," demonstrating a potential RX 9070 series GPU under rocm-smi (ROCm System Management Interface).

Developers have repeatedly bemoaned AMD's slow adoption of new ROCm features and support on mainstream hardware. As of writing, AMD officially supports the RX 7000 and RX 6000 families of GPUs and the Radeon VII on Windows. Select RDNA 2 GPUs can only use the HIP runtime and don't have access to the full HIP SDK. Linux support, which is notably better and more consistent, only extends to the RX 7900 series and the Radeon VII. There are a few workarounds to get unsupported hardware up and running with ROCm, which is reportedly more successful in Linux environments.

Nvidia's CUDA, on the contrary, can be run using GPUs dating back to 2006. Of course, newer architectures offer updated feature sets and fancier instructions. Given the recent advances in AI, 90% of Nvidia's revenue is a result of its data-center accelerators, driven by CUDA at their heart. This shows how critical ROCm is for AMD if it wants to compete against the mammoth that Nvidia has become in the AI space.

To broaden ROCm support, the next addition will likely be Strix Halo, or the Ryzen AI MAX 300 series. With as much as 128GB of unified memory, Strix Halo is much more than a gaming laptop; it's more tailored for LLM inference and development, tackling Apple's M-series silicon.

AMD's upcoming RDNA 4 consumer graphics cards will not get official ROCm support at launch. According to Phoronix, AMD answered a question during its press briefing stating that ROCm support would not arrive for RDNA 4 until sometime after launch day. AMD has since not clarified what the timeline for support for the consumer cards will look like.

ROCm, or Radeon Open Compute Ecosystem, is AMD's open-source answer to Nvidia's CUDA platform. The ROCm software stack is meant to enable HPC and AI workflows for consumer/prosumer products and has offered official support to AMD's consumer products on Windows since 2022. Of course, ever since launching in the pro sector, ROCm has lagged behind the standards of consumer support set by CUDA, which has offered CUDA support for its consumer products at launch for several generations.

Interestingly, AMD first teased its Navi 48 GPU die through ROCm Validation Suite documentation, with its first sighting coming in April of last year. For the cards using Navi 48 not to be ROCm-ready at launch is a bit silly, if not ironic (in the Alanis Morissette sense of the word). RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 may not launch with official ROCm support for a few days, weeks, or even months, but this does not mean that they will not work with the software, nor is it unusual for a new AMD release.

Since first coming to Windows, AMD has had interesting support rollouts for ROCm. When it first broadened its reach to consumer cards, ROCm's support list only included the RX 6900 XT, RX 6600, and, surprisingly, the R9 Fury from 2015, with only the R9 Fury receiving "full" software support and the 6000-series cards only working with parts of the HIP runtime. Currently, AMD's list of supported GPUs includes the full RX 7000-series, most of the RX 6000-series, and the Radeon VII on Windows, though the lower-end of the 6000-series does not support the HIP SDK, and Linux support is only extended to the RX 7900 and Radeon VII.

Compared to CUDA's history of supporting Nvidia's newest consumer cards on launch day and its extensive backward compatibility stretching back to 2006, ROCm has a long way to go. We'll keep our eyes peeled for any announcements from AMD on the future of ROCm support being extended to the RX 9070 XT, 9070, and the rest of the 9000 series. AMD has also recently acknowledged user polls calling for extending full support to the 6000-series and Strix/Strix Halo mobile chips, so compatibility may take longer than hoped to arrive as AMD works through everyone's ROCm wishlists.

Of course, a lack of full official support does not mean that the ROCm software will not run successfully on the newest cards, so those needing their ROCm fix will not be entirely left in the cold come March when RDNA 4 hits shelves (theoretically). For more on the RX 9070-series, Navi 48, and RDNA4 at large, check out our deep dive into today's announcement of AMD's newest GPU architecture.

Today, AMD announced details about RDNA 4 and the forthcoming Radeon RX 9000-series GPUs. As part of its presentation, AMD revealed new details about the Navi 48 GPU die, which could be one of the densest GPUs we've ever seen.

Navi 48, the GPU die that AMD's RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 cards build upon, has officially been confirmed to be 357 mm². This is quite a bit smaller than the 390 mm² estimate that floated around the internet after AMD showed off Navi 48 to outlets at CES 2025. It is also smaller than the GB203 die used by Nvidia in the RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti, with which Navi 48 directly competes.

Not only is the die smaller than Nvidia's, but it is also significantly denser. Navi 48 contains 53.9 billion transistors, compared to the 45.6 billion within GB203. After some simple division, Navi 48 shows up with 150M transistors per mm² versus GB203's 120M transistors per mm². AMD's latest offering upstages Nvidia with a GPU die that is 25% denser than their competitors. Even looking up to Blackwell's consumer peak, the GB202 used in the RTX 5090, AMD outshines its 123MTr/mm² density.

Obviously, this is not a fair comparison on power, efficiency, or any other metric, as the 5090 likely sits comfortably ahead of RDNA 4 in all metrics. Still, it is worth noting that Nvidia did not seem to prioritize transistor density as highly as AMD has in its current generation. And of course we do need to mention that transistor counts are generally considered to be approximate and that there are different ways of counting, so it's possible that factors into the figures we've derived from AMD's and Nvidia's official specs.

Looking one generation back to see how much RDNA 4 improved in density over RDNA 3 becomes difficult. While Navi 48 is a monolithic die, with its cache on the die with the graphics compute, RDNA 3's Navi 31 was not. Navi 31's GCD also sits at 150M transistors per square millimeter, but without accounting for sharing space with the cache on the same die. Accurately comparing Navi 48 and Navi 31's transistor density is an apples-to-oranges game. Still, credit should go to RDNA 4 for matching the transistor density of its predecessor while also fitting its 64MB L3 cache on the die. AMD's decision to abandon RDNA 3's chiplet-style design for a return to a monolithic die does not seem to have sacrificed density or efficiency.

Navi 48 is coming out of the gate swinging fresh out of its release announcement. With the best transistor density in class, as well as a major investment in improving ray tracing and FSR 4 performance, AMD appears to be attacking Nvidia's upper-midrange products with a zeal we haven't seen from the company's GPU division in quite some time.

If the RX 9070 XT can hit its MSRP of $599 at its March launch (nothing short of a miracle based on current GPU stock), AMD will be impossible to ignore for new GPU buyers. For a deeper dive into the architecture of Navi 48 and RDNA 4, be sure to read our deep dive into all we know about the new generation. Ultimately, though, it comes down to performance. Whatever the claimed transistor density, the faster chip will still be faster. Check back next week for the full reviews.

AMD has announced the Radeon RX 9070 at $549 and the RX 9070 XT at $599, both of which ship on March 6. The AMD RDNA 4 architecture and Radeon RX 9000-series GPUs were partially revealed at CES 2025, except they weren't part of AMD's keynote. Very little was known (officially) other than the names of the first two graphics cards for the family. That changes today, with AMD detailing many of the architectural upgrades, specifications, and more, during a video presentation. These will go up against the Nvidia Blackwell RTX 50-series GPUs and the Intel Battlemage Arc B-series GPUs and will likely join the ranks of the best graphics cards in the coming days.

Like Nvidia's RTX 50-series graphics cards, AMD's RDNA 4 launch seems to have been delayed, though perhaps for different reasons. There were rumors that the cards would be revealed at CES 2025 and launched in January, then February, and finally March. That last is no longer a rumor, with the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 set to go on sale on March 6 — and in typical fashion, the "MSRP" or base model cards will have reviews go up the day before, followed by the overclocked non-MSRP models on the launch date. Nvidia's RTX 5070 will likely land right around the same time, just to make things even more exciting.

But if you look at graphics card availability right now, what becomes immediately clear is that virtually everything is sold out or, at the very least, seriously overpriced. AMD has had difficulties with GPU transitions in the past, with the prior generation hanging around for too long and competing with the new parts. This time, it seems to have gone the opposite way, with RX 7000-series GPUs mostly having disappeared from retail shelves in December and January. Only the lower tier RX 7600 and RX 7600 XT are still in stock at MSRP (or close to it).

The result has been dramatically increased demand for everything from mainstream to high-end graphics cards, and Nvidia's RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 Ti all sold out almost instantly at launch. Will AMD's 9070 XT and 9070 fare better? We can hope so, but we suspect there's so much pent-up demand that even with another two months' worth of production and supply, it will still be insufficient. Hopefully, things will settle down later this year, but in the near term, we expect inadequate supplies and increased retail prices — and, yes, scalping.

No doubt Nvidia's record profits driven by AI are a big contributor, and while AMD isn't selling quite as many data center GPUs, a lot of its wafer allocation from TSMC is likely going to data center CPUs and GPUs as well. Gamers are no longer the top priority for either company, in other words; for the time being, they just get the scraps that fall from the AI table.

But enough sad talk. Let's check out the specifications for AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs, talk about architectural updates, and dig into all the other details. We even have pricing information, though as you can guess, that's worth about as much as the paper this is printed on. We'll continue updating this article as additional details become available, but for now, here's everything you need to know about the AMD RDNA 4 and Radeon RX 9000-series GPUs.

RDNA 4 GPU specifications

Here are the known specifications for the RX 9070 series GPUs, along with placeholder information on the RX 9060 series. AMD did share the 9060 name at CES 2025, but no other details have been shared. There are rumors, however, which we've used to flesh out the table — these are indicated by question marks in the various cells.

The RX 9070 XT and 9070 columns should be fully accurate. We're reasonably sure there will be a trimmed-down RX 9060 XT using the same Navi 48 die as the 9070 cards, just with fewer CUs (Compute Units) and memory controllers enabled. Below that, things get murky.

The RX 9060 could use a further binned Navi 48, or it could use Navi 44. Most of the details on Navi 44 are questionable at best, but we'll certainly find out more in the coming months. There might even be RX 9050-class GPUs at some point, but we've avoided listing those for the time being.

Looking at the RX 9070 XT, it uses a fully enabled Navi 48 die that includes 64 RDNA 4 CUs. Combined with a 2.97 GHz boost clock and a 256-bit memory interface with 20 Gbps GDDR6 VRAM, the other specifications mostly come from straight mathematical calculations. The RX 9070 is mostly the same configuration, just with 56 CUs and a 2.52 GHz boost clock — substantially lower than its bigger sibling, though we'll have to wait and see what real-world clocks actually look like.

Power targets also play a role in the final clock speeds, and where the 9070 XT has a 304W TBP (Total Board Power), the 9070 cuts that all the way down to 220W. That's probably a big factor in the 450 MHz difference in boost clocks.

Raw compute works out to 48.7 TFLOPS FP32 on the 9070 XT and 36.1 TFLOPS on the 9070. On paper, that makes the XT up to 35% faster. In practice, we suspect the two chips will be quite a bit closer and that the actual clocks in most games may only be a couple hundred MHz apart, despite what the specs suggest.

AMD has also given the Ray Accelerators and AI Accelerators in the CUs a massive overhaul compared to RDNA 3. For AI, each can do twice as many FP16 operations per cycle and they now support sparse operations. Sparsity can skip up to half of the zero multiply operations to potentially double performance, and it's a feature Nvidia has supported since its second-generation RTX 30-series GPUs. (AMD has also supported sparse operations on its CDNA family of GPUs for several years.)

Moreover, the AI units also support FP8, INT8, BF8, and INT4 operations, with the 8-bit calculations being twice as fast as 16-bit, and 4-bit integers double that again. Put it all together, and you get 389 TFLOPS of sparse FP16 compute and up to 1557 TOPS of sparse INT4 compute.

Keep in mind that the previous generation RDNA 3 architecture featured GPUs with up to 96 CUs and a 384-bit memory interface on the RX 7900 XTX, so while RDNA 4 GPUs are faster on a per-CU basis, AMD doesn't expect the RX 9070 XT to beat the RX 7900 XTX in all workloads.

There's a lot more going on than the raw specs will tell you. First, let's cover the pricing and launch date, then move on to the architectural deep dive.

RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 Performance

How fast are the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 graphics cards? We can't share our own internal benchmarks yet, but AMD provided comparisons against its previous generation RX 7900 GRE. In it's testing of 11 rasterization games and nine ray tracing games, the 9070 XT was on average 42% faster at 4K and 38% faster at 1440p, while the 9070 was 21% faster at 4K and 20% faster at 1440p.

Breaking things down into pure rasterization and pure ray tracing performance, the 9070 XT delivered 37% and 33% improvements in performance at 4K and 1440p in rasterization mode. In ray tracing games, it was 53% and 49% faster on average, again at 4K and 1440p, respectively. The RX 9070 meanwhile provided 18% and 17% higher rasterization performance at 4K and 1440p, while in ray tracing it was 22% and 20% faster on average.

These are AMD's own numbers, so we can't fully vouch for them, but we can use them to get a reasonable idea of where the new AMD cards might land relative to the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 4070 Ti Super (both 16GB cards).

In our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, at 4K in our rasterization test suite the RTX 4070 Ti Super beats the 7900 GRE by 13% at 4K and 7% at 1440p. The RTX 5070 Ti on the other hand was 14% faster than the 4070 Ti Super at 4K and 11% faster at 1440p. Taken together, our existing test results indicate the 5070 Ti would be around 29% faster than the 7900 GRE for 4K rasterization and 19% faster at 1440p.

Flip over to ray tracing and our data has the 4070 Ti Super beating the 7900 GRE by 64% at 4K and 60% at 1440p. The new RTX 5070 Ti leads the 4070 Ti Super by 12% at both 4K and 1440p. That would thus put the 5070 Ti potentially 84% and 79% ahead of the 9070 XT.

Clear as mud? Let's put it this way: Our existing data combined with AMD's data suggests the 9070 XT will beat the 5070 Ti by perhaps 6% at 4K for rasterization and 12% at 1440p. In ray tracing, however, Nvidia would appear to still have the edge and be around 20% faster at 4K and 1440p. We can't be precise just because there are other factors in play — different testing suites, different platforms, and two levels of extrapolation (because we haven't tested the 7900 GRE on our new test suite yet), but overall it appears the 9070 XT will land reasonably close to the 5070 Ti in perforamnce.

Doing the same calculations for the vanilla RX 9070, it would be a decent 12 to 17 percent slower than the 9070 XT, which would be about where the RTX 4070 Ti sits in our testing. But we don't know precisely where the RTX 5070 will land yet, so we can't really come to any conclusion. With only 12GB of VRAM on the Nvidia 5070, however, it seems more likely that the 9070 will take an overall lead. We'll find out for certain next week, so stay tuned.

RX 9000-Series Pricing

How much will the RX 9000-series GPUs cost? AMD has announced the Radeon RX 9070 will start at $549 and the RX 9070 XT will start at $599, placing them firmly in the "mainstream" segment. Given the current market conditions, however, it probably doesn't matter what AMD has given as the MSRP. Short-term, certainly, we expect the cards will all sell out and end up costing much more than the MSRP.

As we said in the Nvidia Blackwell overview, for dedicated desktop graphics cards, we're now living in a world where "budget" means around $250–$300, "mainstream" means $400–$700, "high-end" is for GPUs costing $800 to $1,000, and the "enthusiast" segment targets $1,500 or more. AMD is going after the mainstream segment with the 9070 series, and possibly the lower mainstream and upper budget segments with future 9060 series parts.

Depending on supply, as well as performance, the RDNA 4 series should be worth the price AMD is asking. More likely is that there simply won't be enough cards to satisfy the current demand, not for many months. Given the reasonably low-ish prices, don't be surprised if scalpers and retail markups step in and push the prices up.

It's basically a repeat of the cryptocurrency GPU mining shortages, only this time it's caused by AI and demand from that sector may not go away for many years. Let's hope we're wrong, but the RTX 50-series launches so far have not been promising.

RDNA 4 Release Dates

We listed the March 6, 2025 release date for the RX 9070 cards already, but AMD has also at least partially teased an RX 9060 family of GPUs. Will there be multiple cards or only one? Will there be lower-tier RX 9050 cards as well? The short answer: We don't know. The nebulous answer: Sometime between April and the end of the year, hopefully sooner than later.

We've seen rumored die sizes for Navi 44 that suggest it's a much smaller chip, like more of a replacement for the current Navi 33 (RX 7600 series). If that's correct, it may not come out any time soon. There still appear to be plenty of RX 7600 and RX 7600 XT GPUs floating around, and that's because when those launched there were still a lot of similar performing Navi 23 (RX 6650 XT / RX 6600 XT / RX 6600) cards still available, at lower prices.

The naming scheme from AMD suggests that the RX 9060 will compete with the RTX 5060 family. That would perhaps require a larger chip than what's indicated. But RX 7600 does technically compete with the RTX 4060, and there's no RTX 4050 and probably won't be an RTX 5050.

Will AMD be making a "true budget" RDNA 4 chip? Again, rumors suggest that's at least possible, perhaps even likely. At less than half the size of Navi 48, AMD may try to create a $200~$250 graphics card to go after budget-minded gamers — and OEMs. Certainly it could get a lot more chips per wafer with the rumored 150~160 mm^2 die size.

But if the cards then only sell for $250 or less? That hardly seems worth the effort, not when companies can charge tens of thousands for data center GPUs.

RDNA 4 Core GPU Architecture

The above slide gallery covers the architectural briefing AMD provided in advance of today's reveal, including some of the specifications discussed above as well as finer details. AMD worked to refine the underlying architecture to improve per-CU performance in all major workloads: rasterization, ray tracing, and AI.

Rasterization performance sees the smallest generational gains, but it's still about 40% faster than RDNA 3 according to AMD. Ray tracing performance is basically doubled, and AI performance is doubled for dense FP16 compute, with lower precision formats delivering even higher performance.

The specific details of the rasterization improvements are a bit nebulous. RDNA 4 supports out of order memory requests, which AMD specifically notes as being helpful for ray tracing, but it can help rasterization tasks as well — we just don't have any details on how much. The other major change involves dynamic register allocation. RDNA 3 (and earlier) allocated registers for the worst case for shaders. By dynamically allocating extra registers only when needed, AMD provides an example use case where it could have an extra wave in flight. The slides show three waves versus four waves, which would be a 33% increase, but we don't know if that's representative of real workloads or just for illustrative purposes.

Moving on to ray tracing, this is where AMD spent a significant amount of effort. It doubled the ray/triangle and ray/box intersection rates per RT unit as a start. Then it offers some enhancements including hardware instance transforms (rather than doing a lot of the work via GPU shaders), oriented bounding boxes, an improved BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) structure and traversal, the above-mentioned out of order memory returns, and better ray hardware stack management.

Most of the improvements come from the doubling of intersection rates and BVH compression, but the other aspects combine to deliver a solid improvement as well. How does RDNA 4 compare with Nvidia's latest hardware? That's not fully clear, but certainly it's going to do better per CU than what we saw with RDNA 3 and RDNA 2. It likely won't match Blackwell, but it might be better than Ampere and at least closer to Ada levels of performance.

AI, as already noted, sees the biggest changes. Nvidia has been iterating on its AI tensor cores since the RTX 20-series, and even before that the Volta data center GPU had tensor cores. So Nvidia is on its fifth generation of AI matrix cores while AMD is mostly on its second generation — mostly because it looks like AMD took a lot of the work that's been happening in its CDNA GPUs and brought it over to RDNA 4.

RDNA 3 CUs could do 512 FP16 operations per cycle, with no sparsity support, or 1024 INT4 operations per cycle. With RDNA 4, AMD doubles the baseline FP16 throughput for dense operations, doubles that again for sparse operations, and doubles that again for FP8 workloads — which are proving useful in the AI space. That's up to 8X higher AI throughput for FP8 on RDNA 4 compared to FP16 on RDNA 3, and the INT4 throughput sees a similar up to 8X improvement.

AMD gave a real-world example of how this affects AI performance using Stable Diffusion XL. The RX 9070 XT with 64 CUs took on the RX 7900 XT with 84 CUs. That gives the older GPU a 31% advantage in compute units, but the 9070 XT ended up delivering very close to 2X the performance. That will prove very helpful for other AI and machine learning workloads, including ML-based upscaling and frame generation (see FSR 4 below).

Alongside these changes, AMD has reworked some of the cache and memory hierarchy with RDNA 4. It didn't provide any clear details on what has changed, but it notes that this is the third generation of Infinity Cache. The capacity remains 64MB, the same as what was present on the 256-bit 7900 GRE and 7800 XT, but now the cache is again part of the monolithic chip, so it likely has better latencies and throughput.

RDNA 4 Other Architectural Improvements

RDNA 4 isn't just about core architecture upgrades. Along with the above rasterization, ray tracing, and AI enhancements, AMD has also upgraded a few other areas. One of the big changes is with the media encoding hardware. Last time we checked video encoding performance and quality, AMD came in last place, clearly behind Nvidia and Intel. It looks like RDNA 4 will close the gap.

AMD says it has improved H.264 (AVC) quality by up to 25%, H.265 (HEVC) by 11%, and improved the AV1 encoding efficiency. It also has better support for AV1 and VP9 decoding and reduced memory accesses.

Besides the quality improvements, RDNA 4 adds a dual media engine. Nvidia did this with its Ada architecture, and AMD seems to be taking a similar approach. It likely doesn't help all workloads equally, but AMD says it doubles the AV1 encoding throughput.

Realistically, there's only so far you can go with improving video encoding quality, particularly with hardware encoders. Intel and Nvidia are pretty comparable, but AMD was behind on quality while being ahead on performance with RDNA 3. It sounds like RDNA 4 will continue to be faster while offering similar quality to the competition, which is a good thing.

Another change with RDNA 4 is that AMD has added hardware flip queue support, which offloads video frame scheduling to the GPU. While Nvidia discussed something similar for MFG (Multi Frame Generation), it sounds like AMD's solution is focused on improving video playback by reducing CPU load, as opposed to being something to improve the scheduling of generated frames.

Radeon Image Sharpening (RIS) has also been updated, to RIS2. This is a driver level sharpening solution that's based on AMD's CAS algorithm (Contrast Aware Sharpening), only now the quality is supposed to be better. It's a single click toggle to apply RIS2 across all APIs.

Finally, RDNA 4 GPUs will support PCIe 5.0 interfaces. That doubles the throughput over the x16 link, though in practice most workloads likely won't see much benefit. Gaming in particular doesn't tend to need more than PCIe 3.0, or perhaps 4.0, when using a full x16 connection. However, AI and certain content creation tasks can benefit from the added bandwidth. Don't be surprised if the future Navi 48 chips and possibly even the RX 9060 XT cut the interface down to x8 or even x4 widths.

Sticking with GDDR6 VRAM

One thing that isn't changing from RDNA 3 is the memory support. While Nvidia has moved all of the announced Blackwell RTX 50-series solutions to GDDR7 memory, AMD will continue to use GDDR6 memory, clocked at up to 20 Gbps. Coupled with a 256-bit interface on the 9070 XT and 9070 GPUs, that results in 640 GB/s of memory bandwidth. That's the same VRAM capacity as the RX 7900 GRE and RX 7800 XT, and also the same as Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 4070 Ti Super.

The 64MB Infinity Cache will improve the effective bandwidth, though AMD didn't elect to provide any estimates of cache hit rates so far. The RX 7900 GRE and RX 7800 XT both had 64MB Infinity Caches, and AMD provided effective bandwidth rates that were about 4X the base memory bandwidth with those GPUs, so we'd anticipate the Navi 48 GPUs will see similar results.

It's also possible that further improvements to the Infinity Cache have made it less critical for AMD to move to GDDR7 at present. Considering that Nvidia gets a 40% improvement in raw bandwidth from 28 Gbps GDDR7 compared to AMD's 20 Gbps GDDR6, that might seem like a sizeable advantage. However, effective bandwidth after factoring in the large caches may not be all that different.

Plus, there's only so much bandwidth needed to drive a 64 CU GPU. Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti for example has 70 SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors), which are roughly analogous to AMD's CUs, and the 5070 Ti has a 48MB L2 cache. Putting a larger 64MB L3 cache with fewer GPU processing clusters could reduce the need for higher memory speeds.

AMD continues to use 16Gb (2GB) GDDR6 modules, and we're unaware of any companies currently pursuing 24Gb (3GB) capacities. That's one area where GDDR7 support could prove beneficial for Nvidia in the future, though so far only the RTX 5090 Laptop GPU is using the higher capacity chips.

Monolithic GPUs, Built on TSMC N4P

One of the interesting changes with RDNA 4 is that AMD is, at least for now, ditching the GPU chiplets approach. It may come back to that in the future, but the Navi 48 and presumably the rumored Navi 44 will be monolithic chips. Along with that design choice, AMD is also upgrading from TSMC's N5 process node used on RDNA 3 to the N4P node for RDNA 4.

N4P provides for modest improvements in performance and efficiency compared to the N4 node, which in turn refines the base N5 node. Our understanding is that N4P may introduce some additional metal layers, and N4 used more EUV than N5. What's not entirely clear is how N4P compares to 4N and 4NP — the "for Nvidia" variants that are used with Hopper, Ada, and Blackwell. It's probably pretty similar in most respects, which means that AMD will be on node parity with Nvidia this round.

But AMD isn't really trying to take down Nvidia's top GPUs. The lack of GDDR7 memory and the lack of a larger design prove this. The Navi 48 chip will house 53.9 billion transistors in a 356.5 mm^2 die. Nvidia's GB203 used in the RTX 5080 and 5070 Ti contains 45.6 billion transistors in a 378 mm^2 die... which might suggest AMD actually has a superior process node and/or design. But we can't really conclude that.

While die sizes are pretty straightforward, transistor counts are not. They're more of a mathematical estimate, and there are different ways of counting what constitutes a "transistor." Perhaps AMD does have a denser design with more transistors, perhaps not. Ultimately, we'll have to see how the various GPUs perform.

One interesting side note here is that Navi 31, the top solution from the RDNA 3 family, had a 300 mm^2 GCD (Graphics Compute Die) with six 37.5 mm^2 MCDs (Memory Cache Dies). I wondered when AMD revealed the specs just how much it was actually saving by going the chiplet route. The GCD had 45.6 billion transistors, which means the overall transistor density — looking at the RDNA 3 GCD compared to the RDNA 4 monolithic design — is basically identical (152 MTrans/mm^2 on Navi 31 GCD compared to 151.2 Mtrans/mm^2 on Navi 48).

But let's not get too carried away. It's known that scaling on external interfaces — like the GDDR6 memory controllers — is quite poor with newer process nodes. Navi 31 used twelve 32-bit controllers while Navi 48 has eight 32-bit controllers. If AMD had attempted to make a 384-bit interface on a monolithic design, it would have certainly required a larger chip. Putting that on an older process node for the prior generation did make financial sense at the time, and may yet prove a smart approach for a future AMD product.

No "Made By AMD" Reference Cards

If it wasn't clear yet, AMD will not be making or selling its own reference model RX 9070 series graphics cards. Despite providing some slides of what appear to be MBA (Made By AMD) cards, these are merely graphical renders rather than photos of actual hardware. There were certainly prototype cards created during the design, testing, and validation process, but what those looked like isn't really important.

All of the RX 9070 series graphics cards will be made by AMD's add-in board (AIB) partners. That means two things. First, we'll see a lot of variation in final clock speeds and power draw, not to mention things like the number of fans and RGB lighting. But more importantly, it means AMD has a lot less say in the actual retail graphics card prices.

Very likely AMD has a requirement that all of the AIBs have at least one model for each GPU that will be nominally priced at the stated MSRP. Beyond that, however, all bets are off. "Here's our RX 9070 XT Red Herring for $599... and we sold all of those. Sorry! But you can pick up our Redder Herring OC model for $799!" We saw something like this with the RTX 5070 Ti cards, where there also isn't a reference model from Nvidia.

Long-term, if there's insufficient supply to meet the demand, most AIBs are going to produce higher tier models with a few minor extras and drastically inflated prices. If on the other hand the supply catches up to demand, then it's easy enough to drop prices as needed.

FSR 4 and HYPR-RX

Besides the hardware, AMD has been working on a variety of feature improvements. The biggest one is undoubtedly FSR 4. The fourth iteration of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) algorithm, it will break with tradition in a couple of key ways.

First, FSR 4 will leverage the more potent AI accelerators in the RDNA 4 GPUs. At launch, it will require an RDNA 4 GPU. Down the road a few months, AMD may try back-porting the algorithm so that it can run on RDNA 3 and maybe even RDNA 2 GPUs... but it seems unlikely.

Instead, FSR 4 will basically co-exist with FSR 3.1, or rather, the non-AI upscaling will continue to be offered. It's not entirely clear exactly how this will play out, but keeping everything unified under one name makes more sense. What we do know is that AMD plans to allow gamers to use the more potent FSR 4 algorithm on games that have FSR 3.1 support. Will that happen automatically or require a driver settings toggle? It seems like the latter but we'll have to wait and see.

FSR 4 isn't just for upscaling, either; it also has frame generation. From our understanding, both upscaling and framegen will use the AI accelerators of the RX 9000-series GPUs. AMD also says RDNA 4 is "neural rendering ready" without really going into further detail. Presumably that's related to Microsoft's new Cooperative Vectors feature, which is something Nvidia also talked about with Blackwell.

We've asked for additional details on how FSR 4 works, in terms of the computations. AMD hasn't responded, but one slide does note that the RX 9070 XT offers "up to 779 TOPS AI Acceleration" while talking about FSR 4. Now, that's either dense INT4 operations or sparse INT8 operations, as the 9070 XT hits double that figure for sparse INT4, but we don't have a direct answer on whether the algorithms are using INT4 or INT8 yet. Either way, that's a lot more theoretical compute than what you can get from prior generation AMD GPUs, which is why we don't anticipate the AI upscaling and framegen models getting backported.

We also asked if FSR 4 was using a transformers-based network or a convolutional neural network. DLSS 4 offers better image fidelity than DLSS 3 by using transformers, and AMD may have skipped the CNN approach since it's late to the AI-powered upscaling and framegen party. However, we don't have a direct answer yet. We do have some image quality comparisons from AMD, in the slides above, and FSR 4 definitely looks better than FSR 3.1.

As with Nvidia's use of performance mode upscaling with framegen, we don't generally focus on the promised performance after all these extras. Framegen in particular is very heavy on marketing in our experience. It's less problematic when you already have a high base framerate, but then it's also less necessary when you're already getting 100+ FPS.

AMD says it will have over 30 games with FSR 4 enabled for the RX 9070 series launch, with 75+ games coming in 2025.

AMD also talked about HYPR-RX, which combines a variety of driver-level performance boosting features and can be enabled with a single click. We've poked at it a bit in the past, and it can be useful in some cases, but we prefer sticking with apples to apples comparisons. If you're just playing games, however, enabling HYPR-RX to apply all of the features including FSR/RSR, Anti-Lag, Radeon Boost, and AFMF 2 could be useful.

AMD also has a new AFMF 2.1 release that imprves the quality of the algorithm, reducing ghosting, improving fine features, and detecting and handling overlays better.

Drivers and Software

The last item AMD discussed is its new Adrenalin 25.3.1 drivers along with some new software. While most of the driver interface will be familiar to AMD GPU users, there are some new additions along with some behind the scenes changes. AI plays a role in both areas. We've already discussed FSR 4 upscaling and framegen, so let's talk about the other AI uses.

First, AMD is using AI to help find rendering errors and to detect instability and other issues. AMD claims its new 25.3.1 drivers will be perhaps the best and most stable drivers it has ever released, with fewer rendering errors. We'll have to wait and see how that goes...

Moving on, similar to Nvidia's Chat RTX and other tools, AMD is providing some easy to access AI-powered features. These are all managed by a new AMD Install Manager that sits alongside the usual AMD Software in your system tray. Besides your GPU drivers, it can also detect if you have an AMD platform and keep your chipset drivers updated. And then there are some new extras: AMD Chat, AMD Image Inspector, and the AI Apps Manager (among others).

AMD Chat is a chatbot designed to answer questions specifically about your PC hardware and GPU. You can ask it about GPU temperatures, performance, and more. It's a hefty 25GB download, though, so you might not want to install if it you're low on space — or if chatting with your PC isn't something you plan on doing.

The AI Apps Manager provides a list of software and utilities that can use AI that are installed or available to install. So if you have Adobe CC, some of those apps might show up. Or you can use it to install Amuse, AMD's tuned AI image and video generation tool.

Finally, the Image Inspector is a feature to help with finding and reporting rendering errors and bugs. AMD is already using AI to help it find issues internally, and the Image Inspector is an opt-in feature that allows you to participate. Using spare GPU resources (so it won't go crazy and use all your GPU power if you're in a demanding game), it can automatically capture rendering errors and submit them to AMD, should you enable the feature. It sounds interesting, but we suspect there might be a performance hit still, even if it's small.

The GPU landscape

Frankly, RDNA 4 feels like what AMD should have been doing with RDNA 3 rather than pursuing the abandoned-for-now GPU chiplets approach. AMD has finally decided to put serious effort into ray tracing hardware and AI in its consumer product line. We can understand why RDNA 2 was lacking in these areas — Nvidia's GeForce RTX feature set probably caught the company off guard — but when RDNA 3 arrived in 2022, it really needed to do more and be more.

What's interesting is that all of these new hardware features haven't caused a massive bloat in the die size. Navi 48 is 357 mm^2 on a 5nm-class node (N4P). Navi 31 was 300 mm^2 on a 5nm-class node (N5), with Infinity Fabric links to the external memory and cache chiplets. Rip out those links, rework the cores, and this was all possible several years ago. Which is obvious, since Nvidia already did that, but it felt like RDNA 3 doubled down on the "ray tracing and AI aren't really that important" marketing and got left behind. RDNA 4 finally rights that misstep, or at least attempts to. Now we just need to see how the actual hardware performs in a variety of tasks.

AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs will have to compete with Nvidia Blackwell RTX and Intel Arc Battlemage solutions. As we discussed already, supply and availability of all graphics cards has become quite poor of late. (Yes, that's a sarcastic understatement.) Every recently launched GPU has sold out quickly, with many cards then selling at prices far above the original MSRP. It started with the Arc B580 and became especially painful with Nvidia's Blackwell launches.

Things aren't going to get better in the near term. The big issue is that there are a lot of companies competing for a limited supply of silicon manufacturing. TSMC only has the ability to process so many wafers in a month. Right now, AMD, Apple, Intel, and Nvidia are all using TSMC for various chips, and there are plenty of other companies as well — Broadcom, Facebook, Google, Amazon... the list can get quite large.

Even if a company pays for a certain number of wafers in a given month, what to do with those wafers is still up for debate. Just looking at the main PC companies, AMD could make RDNA 4 GPUs on TSMC's N4P node, sure. Or it could make Zen 5 CPU chiplets for both Ryzen and EPYC CPUs, CDNA 3 data center GPUs (MI300X), other Ryzen APU designs for laptops and handhelds, or the future CDNA 4 GPUs that are likely coming this year. Nvidia has Grace CPUs, Hopper and Blackwell data center GPUs, NVLink processors, Ada Lovelace previous generation GPUs, and the new Blackwell RTX GPUs that are all using variants of TSMC's 5nm-class nodes. And Intel has leveraged TSMC for all or part of its Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, and Battlemage product lines.

Nvidia made record profits last year of $130 billion, primarily driven by AI. Its consumer gaming division only accounted for $11.35 billion, 8.7% of the total. And going forward, Nvidia will likely invest even more heavily in data center GPUs. That will eat up a lot of wafers, needless to say, and gaming will have to compete for its share.

The good news is that more manufacturing capacity is coming online. A lot of that will likely go to create more AI processors, but the more capacity that exists, the more likely it is for other, less profitable chips — like consumer GPUs — to get made. And maybe AMD and Intel will try to grow their gaming GPU divisions while Nvidia is otherwise occupied. Or maybe Nvidia will treat gaming as a passion project that started the company and so it will try to ensure at least a reasonable number of chips get made. Maybe, maybe...

Whatever happens, what's clear right now is that, as long as AI continues to grow as an industry, gaming GPUs are now a lower priority item for most of the biggest players in the graphics space. Let's hope that, like cyptocurrency mining, this turns out to be just a passing phase. But we wouldn't bet the farm on that.

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AMD reportedly held a press briefing and disclosed more information about its upcoming Radeon RX 9000-series graphics processors as well as the RDNA 4 architecture. Perhaps the most important part was the disclosure of AMD's official performance numbers of the new Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card that appeared to be significantly ahead of the Radeon RX 7900 GRE, according to the allegedly official numbers published by VideoCardz.

In fact, AMD claims that the upcoming Radeon RX 9070 XT is 42% – 168% faster than the Radeon RX 7900 GRE at a 4K resolution with 'ultra' quality settings across over 30 games. The Radeon RX 9070 XT outperforms the RX 7900 GRE by an average of 38% at 1440p and 42% at 2160p. However with certain titles that rely on ray tracing more than others — such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Hitman 3 — performance gains reach 164% –168%, again according to the numbers published by VideoCardz.

Games with ray tracing tend to see the biggest increases, emphasizing AMD's RDNA 4 advances in handling RT workloads. Titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2, F1 24, and Hitman 3 show the strongest performance jumps of 56% to 66%, which clearly makes the new Radeon RX 9070-series offerings strong contenders to sit amongst the best graphics cards in the coming quarters.

When it comes to the performance difference between the Radeon RX 9070 XT and the Radeon RX 9070 (non-XT), the delta averages between 16.1% at 1440p Ultra Settings and 18.3% at 2160p Ultra Settings across the tested games, according to AMD. Yet, the Radeon RX 9070 (non-XT) still delivers a 20% performance boost at 1440p and a 21% higher performance at 2160p over the Radeon RX 7900 GRE.

AMD admitted that it did not have a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti for comparison, so it did not compare its new flagship against some of Nvidia's most wanted parts of today. The company did not explain why it decided not to compare its upcoming Radeon RX 9070 XT against its existing Radeon RX 7900 XTX flagship, but stuck to the cut-down Radeon RX 7900 GRE. The latter has around 25% lower compute performance compared to the range-topping Radeon RX 7900 XTX, but also has 16GB of memory onboard, whereas the range-topping board carries 24GB of GDDR6 VRAM.

Unlike AMD, Nvidia uses upscaling technologies like frame generation to demonstrate performance improvements over the previous generation, so the red company gains some kudos. As a result, AMD has chosen to focus on native rendering performance and ray tracing, so performance gains are quite real. More details will, of course, be shared on February 28 when AMD officially presents its Radeon RX 9070-series products.

As Nvidia confirmed yesterday, a handful of RTX 50 GPUs have been affected by a manufacturing defect resulting in fewer ROPs than specified. The impacted GPUs, per Nvidia, include the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5070 Ti; the RTX 5080 is seemingly unaffected, with no reports having emerged yet. Meanwhile, a user at ComputerBase forums discovered that their RTX 5070 Ti was affected and offered several performance benchmarks for analysis.

The out-of-spec RTX 50 series GPUs news broke when a user at TechPowerUp's forums reported a missing ROP partition (eight ROPs) on their RTX 5090. All attempts through software such as driver reinstalls, and switching vBIOS versions, were in vain. As the news spread, more users started to double-check their units, kicking in the domino effect. Eventually, Nvidia confirmed that this "rare" issue resides at the hardware level and only impacts 0.5% of GPUs produced; claimed to decrease performance by 4%.

It's unclear how Nvidia greenlit defective GB202 and GB203 chips, which are also subject to testing by AIB partners. In any case, a user with the alias "Der Zeitgeist" reported their MSI RTX 5070 Ti Gaming Trio had defective silicon, containing 88 ROPs instead of the specified 96, as confirmed by the Nvidia white paper. The user provided several benchmarks of their "nerfed" unit, and the performance gap can be as high as 12% in some scenarios.

In 3DMark Time Spy, the cut-down RTX 5070 Ti accumulated 24,755 points, 10% lower than ComputerBase's MSI Ventus OC variant with all 96 ROPs present. In other benchmarks that aren't exactly ROP-intensive, the difference is minimal but still noticeable.

What's intriguing is that the RTX 5080 remains unaffected, built using the same GB203 chip as the RTX 5070 Ti. This hardware defect may explain Nvidia's decision to push the budget RTX 5070 back to early March. Affected customers have been asked to contact their respective board partners for a replacement, which might take a while given the ongoing Blackwell shortages.

Melting concerns, PCIe stability issues, lack of supply, and now defective silicon have plagued the RTX 50 family launch. The silver lining is that the supply aspect of these problems is rumored to improve starting next month, coincidentally aligning with AMD's RDNA 4 launch.

AMD will announce the highly anticipated Radeon RX 9070-series graphics cards on February 28, seven days from now, at 8 AM ET via its YouTube channel. Many users are looking forward to this launch, hoping the price-to-performance ratio will be more palatable and readily available for purchase.

AMD's marketing materials have included renders of what many thought would be the reference design for the Radeon RX 9070 or Radeon RX 9070 XT. However, in its latest banner, AMD clarified that the design is an "Artistic Render. Not Available for Purchase," which implies that the chipmaker will not release any 'Made by AMD' (MBA) models this generation. The move may prove to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there will be more silicon for AIB partners, but on the other hand, there may not be many options at MSRP.

AMD's partners often offer faster and better-cooled custom variants of the chipmaker's GPUs. However, some users still prefer the reference models over the custom variants. Nonetheless, that doesn't mean there won't be any GPUs with MSRP pricing, as all brands typically have budget-oriented models that prioritize simplicity and pricing over all the bells and whistles.

AMD has not officially revealed any specifications or pricing, but we've had our fair share of preliminary retailer listings. Last month, a Spanish retailer accidentally revealed Gigabyte's lineup with its pricing, including the 21% VAT applied in Spain. B&H also had a pre-order listing hinting at a launch date on January 23 (later taken down), and Amazon listings showed RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT for $649 and $749. This should be taken with a bag of salt, as it could all be placeholder pricing.

Asus showcased Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT variations under Prime and TUF Gaming editions at CES 2025, but no information about the GPUs was revealed. Earlier leaks hinted the RX 9070 series with PCIe 5.0 support, and it was rumored that the RX 9070 XT had 16GB VRAM on a 256-bit interface and 4,096 Stream Processors. AMD Radeon RX 9070 series is based on RDNA 4 architecture, which is said to have optimized compute units with upgraded AI and Ray Tracing accelerators and better media encoding.

With the reveal seven days away, we should see its specifications, MSRP pricing, and multiple variations from AIB partners. It is a good opportunity for AMD to capitalize on all the GeForce RTX 50-series woes, such as the missing ROPs, black screen issues, and melting 16-pin connectors.