Friday, January 17th 2025
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PowerColor Radeon RX 9070 Reaper Graphics Card Stock Appears in UK
PowerColor started its online marketing campaign for new Reaper graphics card family earlier this week—a rendered scythe graphic was posted on social media along with this cryptic message: "The Reaper has arrived. Everything is under your control. Will you be the Reaper or the one reaped?" The Taiwanese graphics cards company has already unveiled its opening salvo of new RDNA 4-based card designs—on the internet and in real life. For example, PowerColor's Radeon RX 9070 XT Reaper model was on display at CES 2025—where TechPowerUp spent a couple of minutes with an SFF-form-factor-friendly demonstration sample. Since then, more photo evidence has been posted on the AMD subreddit—a UK retailer appears to have units in-stock at their warehouse.
Team Red is seemingly operating in silent mode—they have not revealed concrete details about the upcoming launch of Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 (non-XT) GPUs. Preliminary specification leaks and photos of boxed retail units have turned up this week—with yesterday's Reddit post indicating that Scan UK has received a big cardboard box containing PowerColor Radeon RX 9070 Reaper cards. Industry watchdogs reckon that AMD is still forming a release strategy—with board partners and retail/e-tail outlets waiting on and seemingly ready to receive new or finalized instructions.
Sources:
AMD Subreddit, PowerColor Facebook post, VideoCardz
Team Red is seemingly operating in silent mode—they have not revealed concrete details about the upcoming launch of Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 (non-XT) GPUs. Preliminary specification leaks and photos of boxed retail units have turned up this week—with yesterday's Reddit post indicating that Scan UK has received a big cardboard box containing PowerColor Radeon RX 9070 Reaper cards. Industry watchdogs reckon that AMD is still forming a release strategy—with board partners and retail/e-tail outlets waiting on and seemingly ready to receive new or finalized instructions.
64 Comments on PowerColor Radeon RX 9070 Reaper Graphics Card Stock Appears in UK
Pure path-tracing performance is almost irrelevant for the current generation because it's too expensive to use. Even a 4090 can't handle Indiana Jones without a lot of assistance from DLSS and FG, which takes away a massive amount of image quality for minimal shadow quality improvements that PT brings over the hybrid RT mode that 99.9% of RT-enabled games use right now.
Maybe we can have a pure path-tracing discussion in five years time if and when the hardware catches up.
Imagine spending over $2000 on a GPU and getting slugging controls that feel like an old 30fps PS3 game. The timestamp I linked he's getting 30-40fps. without framegen. That's the argument for why PT is irrelevant on hardware we have at the moment, because it looks slightly nicer than the hybrid RT mode but takes a crisp, clean, responsive >60fps experience and turns it into a smeary, unresponsive mess even on top-end hardware. For a 9070 or 5070 it's going to be completely out of the question.
You are saying dlss adds temporal blur, but do you realize what TAA stands for and what it does? That's why native looks worse than dlss, cause it's a temporal AA solution that samples frames.
This is a thread about a non-XT 9070, something AMD claim will match a 4070S, give or take. If the 4090 can't do it without upscaling, then something in the 4070's ballpark has no hope.
Here's the same guy running path-tracing on a 4070. He doesn't even bother trying to do full path tracing beyond 1080p because it's a 30fps experience. DLSS at 1080p means that you're upscaling from 720p which makes image quality absolutely abysmal, and that's why he gives up with full path tracing at that point.
I'm not trying to make the point that path tracing is utterly impossible, just that you need extremely high-end hardware to even have a chance, and even then you're giving up a far better framerate at much sharper image quality and much better input latency in order to do so :)
For the purposes of sub-$1000 GPUs in 2025, it's going to be hybrid RT rendering for sure.
You literally said he is getting 60 with dlss and frame gen which is just not true according to the video....
I don't see how that's relevant anyways, obviously you won't try to play at a 4k monitor with a card like the 9070 or the 5070. What the 4090 can do at 4k dlss, the 5070 and the 9070 can also do at their target resolutions (1440p). Even the numbers you are using now for the 4070 are wildly inaccurate compared to the video you posted.... Wth man?
FULL PT (not hybrid at all, which is what you're talking about right? - similar to the full PT implementation in CP2077's RT Overdrive) is not pretty on even a 4090:
So to get input lag down to reasonable levels whether you run FG or not, you have to run DLSS performance, which is upscaled from 1080p, on a $2300 graphics card!
Nobody spends $2300 on a GPU and willingly accepts that it's only good for 1080p. Maybe this is the problem, I don't think I said that anywhere. You are having an argument over something I didn't say. If I "literally said he is getting 60 with dlss and frame gen", then please find where I typed that because I don't recall doing so.
I said:
[INDENT]"as of 2025 there are only two games that have full path-tracing support - CP2077 and Indiana Jones. Neither of them can be path-traced on hardware less than a 4090 without severe compromise, and both games look far better with hybrid rendering"[/INDENT]
"Hardware less than a 4090" means I was talking about a 4080S and below, which is more relevant to this 9070 (non-XT) thread, and also means irrelevant to your point of contention with the 4090 video I posted. Less than a 4090 != a 4090.
I also said:
[INDENT]"Pure path-tracing performance is almost irrelevant for the current generation because it's too expensive to use. Even a 4090 can't handle Indiana Jones without a lot of assistance"[/INDENT]
[INDENT][/INDENT]
So yeah, a 4090 can do it, but it needs DLSS performance which is an insane amount of help. The 4070 video I linked has the 4070 upscaling from 720p (DLSSQ @ 1080p) with full PT and it's barely getting 30fps. You can't save that with framegen because the base framerate is too low and DLLS performance might get you to 50fps but at that point you're upscaling from a 540p image and it's not 1998 any more - people want more detail than that, especially when they paid $600 for their graphics card in 2023.
So you detected the FG blurriness from a video, a video that didn't even have FG enabled. That's what I call placebo.
To make this abundantly clear, that's still Hybrid RT at those framerates.
The 4090 struggles to hit 60fps at full PT with DLSS performance (22:01 timestamp).
Our mindset is so dedicated to running down AMD the company stands no chance of getting a fair crack of the whip
at any time.
Even IF, by some strange twist this gen proves reasonably successful, I suspect AMD will still throw in the towel and switch
production to other markets.
Why should they have to fight for every sale against a market stacked against them at every turn?
AMD canned Navi 41 and 42 and moved all of those assets/resources to UDNA because I suspect that UDNA is coming out much faster than expected. Possibly 6 months faster than 7900xt to 9070xt. They have a real possibility to beat Nvidia to the market by nearly half a year, 4 months worst case, but possibly 12 months best case. Nvidia's Rubin platform is for enterprise and that's all they essentially have outside their ARM CPU.
Basically, AMD is planing a forward attack for once.
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