Monday, January 6th 2025
AMD Debuts Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 Powered by RDNA 4, and FSR 4
AMD at the 2025 International CES announced the Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 desktop performance-segment graphics cards. These will be the face of AMD's next generation of gaming graphics products, and will be powered by the new RDNA 4 graphics architecture. AMD hopes to launch both cards within Q1 2025. AMD changed the nomenclature of its gaming GPUs mainly because it has made a tactical retreat from the enthusiast graphics segment, its fastest products will compete in the performance segment. From the way AMD arranged the Radeon RX 9070 series and 9060 series product stack against the backdrop of the Radeon RX 7000 series, the GeForce RTX 4000 series, and the anticipated GeForce RTX 5000 series, the RX 9070 XT will offer performance roughly similar to the Radeon RX 7900 XT in raster, with the RX 9070 being slightly faster than the RX 7800 XT. The RX 9060 XT will beat the RX 7700 XT, while the RX 9060 beats the RX 7600 XT.
With RDNA 4, AMD claims generational SIMD performance increase on the RDNA 4 compute units. The 2nd Gen AI accelerators will boast of generational performance increase, and AMD will debut a locally-accelerated generative AI application down the line, called the AMD Adrenalin AI, which can generate images, summarize documents, and perform some linguistic/grammar tasks (rewriting), and serve as a chatbot for answering AMD-related queries. This is basically AMD's answer to NVIDIA Chat RTX. AMD's 3rd Gen Ray accelerator is expected to reduce the performance cost of ray tracing, by putting more of the ray tracing workload through dedicated hardware, offloading the SIMD engine. Lastly, AMD is expected to significantly upgrade the media acceleration and display I/O of its GPUs.AMD also announced FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4), which has been developed for RDNA 4 (not sure if it will work on older generations of Radeon). It introduces a new machine learning (ML) based upscaling component to handle Super Resolution. This will be paired with Frame Generation, and an updated Anti-Lag 2, to make up the FSR 4 feature-set. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is confirmed to be one of the first titles to utilize FSR 4.Nearly all AMD add-in board partners (AIBs) are ready with Radeon 9070 series graphics cards, including Acer, ASRock, ASUS, GIGABYTE, Sapphire, PowerColor, XFX, Vastarmor, and Yeston. MSI seems to have discontinued being an AMD AIB.
We also got our first peek at what the "Navi 48" GPU powering the Radeon RX 9070 series looks like—it features an unusual rectangular die with a 2:1 aspect ratio, which seems to lend plausibility to the popular theory that the "Navi 48" is two "Navi 44" dies joined at the hip with full cache-coherency. The GPU is rumored to feature a 256-bit GDDR6 memory interface, and 64 compute units (4,096 stream processors). The "Navi 44," on the other hand, is exactly half of this (128-bit GDDR6, 32 CU). AMD is building the "Navi 48" and "Navi 44" on the TSMC N4P (4 nm EUV) foundry node, on which it is building pretty much its entire current-generation, from mobile processors, to CPU chiplets.
With RDNA 4, AMD claims generational SIMD performance increase on the RDNA 4 compute units. The 2nd Gen AI accelerators will boast of generational performance increase, and AMD will debut a locally-accelerated generative AI application down the line, called the AMD Adrenalin AI, which can generate images, summarize documents, and perform some linguistic/grammar tasks (rewriting), and serve as a chatbot for answering AMD-related queries. This is basically AMD's answer to NVIDIA Chat RTX. AMD's 3rd Gen Ray accelerator is expected to reduce the performance cost of ray tracing, by putting more of the ray tracing workload through dedicated hardware, offloading the SIMD engine. Lastly, AMD is expected to significantly upgrade the media acceleration and display I/O of its GPUs.AMD also announced FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4), which has been developed for RDNA 4 (not sure if it will work on older generations of Radeon). It introduces a new machine learning (ML) based upscaling component to handle Super Resolution. This will be paired with Frame Generation, and an updated Anti-Lag 2, to make up the FSR 4 feature-set. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is confirmed to be one of the first titles to utilize FSR 4.Nearly all AMD add-in board partners (AIBs) are ready with Radeon 9070 series graphics cards, including Acer, ASRock, ASUS, GIGABYTE, Sapphire, PowerColor, XFX, Vastarmor, and Yeston. MSI seems to have discontinued being an AMD AIB.
We also got our first peek at what the "Navi 48" GPU powering the Radeon RX 9070 series looks like—it features an unusual rectangular die with a 2:1 aspect ratio, which seems to lend plausibility to the popular theory that the "Navi 48" is two "Navi 44" dies joined at the hip with full cache-coherency. The GPU is rumored to feature a 256-bit GDDR6 memory interface, and 64 compute units (4,096 stream processors). The "Navi 44," on the other hand, is exactly half of this (128-bit GDDR6, 32 CU). AMD is building the "Navi 48" and "Navi 44" on the TSMC N4P (4 nm EUV) foundry node, on which it is building pretty much its entire current-generation, from mobile processors, to CPU chiplets.
293 Comments on AMD Debuts Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 Powered by RDNA 4, and FSR 4
Performance wise it does seem to be a 7900xt in pure raster given that 4th slide in the top row. To be fair to AMD they've been pretty clear that RDNA4 won't compete on the high end even if their marketing name scheme is stupid.
That is the least of their issues at this point.
AMD dropped the ball hard this gen. Fact that they didn't even present RDNA4 and FSR4 during the CES is a testament to the fact they have capitulated !
Not looking forward to seeing the prices of higher end 5070Ti and up Nvidia's product stack with no competition. I hope AMD made ~30% improvement to raytracing(to catch up with Intel & Nvidia), that FSR 4 is roughly the equivalent of DLSS and that they price these extremely competitively.
As someone that skips every other generation(at least) and upgrades when they can get roughly 2x the performance, and with my 6800XT being long in the tooth for 5120x1440, it looks like my only real option this year will be the 5070ti/5080.
RX 9070 will be more of the same, released more than 4 years ago in the form of RX 6800 XT.
If they pull a RX 5700 XT (without the initial driver problems, please AMD) and launch it an "appropriate" $599 or such, then that would be impressive, but that's being really optimistic at this point.
The memory bus being too narrow (256 vs 384 bit) alone would've guaranteed that. The biggest performance improvements that were leaked had nothing to do with pure raster performance too. They were focused on RT performance being a good bit higher and to a minor extent the video en/decoder (which was bugged in RDNA3).
Its good to see that the rumors of it performing like a 7900GRE are incorrect for the 9070XT though. Especially given the rumored price range of $500-600 at the top end. Sales would be dire for that performance and for that price in 2025 vs a 5070 or 5060. I don't think the price has been announced yet. The rumors were varying from $450-600 a few weeks back though.
That would be the smart thing to do anyways IMO. They'll still make plenty of money if they sell a heap of them. Which they would for that price. Given this launch data so far I'm not optimistic of them being smart right now.
If it has 7900XT render performance and 4080 RT performance for $799 it should sell like hotcakes. I keep seeing people with this class of hardware crying about their not being a enthusiast level card, I don't consider my 7900XTX enthusiast, AMD hasn't made a high end competitor for two generations already and the sales of actual graphics hardware is consolidating into 9060/7900GRE/4070/4060 area unless you are talking about integrated and if they really come through on that front they just nailed it.