Tuesday, March 11th 2025
AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Reportedly Outperforms RTX 5080 Through Undervolting
AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT is demonstrating unexpected performance gains through aggressive undervolting, with overclocking specialists documenting significant improvements that push the GPU past NVIDIA's pricier GeForce RTX 5080 in specific benchmarks. Recent tests by Der8auer using a PowerColor Red Devil RX 9070 XT revealed a 10% frame rate increase in Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K Ultra settings by applying a -170 mV voltage offset while increasing the power target to 110%. This modification enabled the GPU to reach clock speeds of 3.36 GHz, compared to 2.90 GHz at stock settings, resulting in 66 FPS versus the RTX 5080's 65 FPS in identical testing environments. The undervolting phenomenon appears consistent across the product line, with YouTuber Alva Jonathan achieving similar 10% performance improvements on the standard RX 9070 using ASRock's Steel Legend model.
Both testers discovered that traditional core clock overclocking yielded negligible results, suggesting these factory-overclocked cards are already operating near their architectural limits. The voltage-frequency curve adjustments effectively lower the voltage required for higher frequencies. Memory overclocking proved counterproductive, with error correction mechanisms actually reducing in-game performance when pushed beyond stable parameters. These results come with important caveats—both tested units are premium variants with enhanced power delivery and cooling solutions that sell significantly above AMD's MSRP. The PowerColor Red Devil commanded a $200 premium over the RX 9070 XT's $599 launch price, while the ASRock Steel Legend carried a $90 markup over the RX 9070's base $550 MSRP. Even with these premiums, however, the high-end RX 9070 XT models remain approximately $200 less expensive than NVIDIA's RTX 5080 while delivering comparable rasterization performance after optimization, despite NVIDIA's ongoing advantages in ray tracing capabilities and software ecosystem.
Source:
via Tom's Hardware
Both testers discovered that traditional core clock overclocking yielded negligible results, suggesting these factory-overclocked cards are already operating near their architectural limits. The voltage-frequency curve adjustments effectively lower the voltage required for higher frequencies. Memory overclocking proved counterproductive, with error correction mechanisms actually reducing in-game performance when pushed beyond stable parameters. These results come with important caveats—both tested units are premium variants with enhanced power delivery and cooling solutions that sell significantly above AMD's MSRP. The PowerColor Red Devil commanded a $200 premium over the RX 9070 XT's $599 launch price, while the ASRock Steel Legend carried a $90 markup over the RX 9070's base $550 MSRP. Even with these premiums, however, the high-end RX 9070 XT models remain approximately $200 less expensive than NVIDIA's RTX 5080 while delivering comparable rasterization performance after optimization, despite NVIDIA's ongoing advantages in ray tracing capabilities and software ecosystem.
94 Comments on AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Reportedly Outperforms RTX 5080 Through Undervolting
If people want to make their rational point, they could just do it that way from the start, that could work.Sorry @Vayra86, saw you edited after we kept conversing.
I suppose that means you haven't seen the posts where I talked about it yet, it was a gift :) search my posts if you want. I wasn't intending on buying anything for myself till both the 9070XT and 5070Ti were out. Good things come to those who help others :) You shouldn't make such assumptions it's a bad look :slap: you could have asked. But you can keep laughing I suppose, I didn't pay for it and it's among the best gifts I've ever received :toast:
The red devil is just a high end expensive card. I wonder if those gpus are selected for such high end cards?
I wonder if it s only one benchmark or cross stable over 40 games with at least 1 hour game play each.
Games tend to crash with same settings with my 7800xt - one game stable does not imlly stable in another game after 31 minutes.Why should undervolt harm a card?
You reduce the direct current voltage
you may check any diode, transistor, fet datasheet first please.
None of you have a degree in physics, much less participated in the creation of any hardware in your lives.
But if you had the opportunity, I bet you would undervolt the system at the factory without consulting any engineer or physicist about it.
You have no idea how many GPUs or CPUs would have problems with such a change.
There are people with PCs at room temperature of 10 degrees or less.
There are people with PCs at room temperature of 30 degrees or more.
Changes in voltage change the behavior of the CPU and GPU. If it spikes and needs more power and the voltage is fixed, it will cause bugs or even the system will shut down.
Sometimes I see people on forums saying that the PC shuts down and that it is not the culprit.
What I don't know is how that impacts the Hellhound and Reaper lineups.
I expect the Hellhound models are similar enough or ±3% Red Devil performance.
No word on Sapphire binning Pulse/Nitro like this (I might find out this weekend).The only thing that comes to mind is harmed performance/stability.
Whenever someone rages over these AMD cards it's Booboo the Foo.
They can't overclock, can't figure out menus and can't figure out stability.
Let them ragequit and return a perfectly working card. We'll put it to work.
It just showed that you're the ignorant one here
Explain to me why manufacturers no longer release firmware with voltage regulated downwards?
Explain to me why manufacturers use dynamic voltage? And why do you, the users, know more than the engineers and physicists who created the hardware?
Because you can just restore the defaults or the software will do that for you automatically if you go under/over the stability limits?
And you didn't know that the software those same engineers tested their creation with, have imposed limits for how much you can pull those frequency and voltage sliders around, numbers left there for us to play with, given by design?
Do you know what the Silicon Lottery is?
Every chip is different and needs different voltages to work Motherboard/Video cards manufacturers set voltages in a certain range (given by AMD/Intel/Nvidia) that all chips will work without problems. So the user can tune the chip they bought within those certain voltages that are safe or not. But I don't think I need to teach you in this thread what a CPU/GPU is and how they work.
But there are manufacturers who don't mind doing the kindness of replacing the CPU/motherboard or GPU of the person who messed around with the voltage and clock...
Just look anywhere and you'll see people who had their parts burned out by messing around with this.
Intel itself didn't want to give a warranty to people who overclocked Intel 13th and 14th generation processors, there's news about this everywhere...
Reality is not what you want it to be.
letmegooglethat.com/?q=Intel+14th+gen+crash+windows
Just two very simple examples.
for you to search on Google
Have you ever stopped to think why the Intel 285 and 265 came with lower clocks than the Intel 14900k and 14700k??
Was it because Intel forced a Turbo Clock that was not stable and released it anyway??
If not even Intel knew how to size the clock and the acceptable voltage, you will know.
With such a variety of a silicon quality, board partner hardware choices for a specific model, all kind of different workloads the given GPU can handle in any scenario, the vast values choices given by a certain tuning software is there for a reason. It's there to cover various models, from low-end to high-end, and even across different gens of hardware with completely different architectures. Yet it's made that you can't damage your hardware by setting unreasonable values, it'll just reboot the driver or PC althogether.Imagine John Travolta Pulp Fiction gif here. Sorry, I'm on a phone.
Do you know when to stop dude? This is GPU undervolting news thread. And no, no one ever damaged or void their hardware warranty by undervolting.
But that has nothing to do with why people get into trouble and bug their PCs. Sure if your overclock/undervolt is unstable, your PC will crash. And then you change it so it does work. Its really that simple. In fact, its what overclocking is all about: trial and error, perhaps but not necessarily helped by knowledge and experience.
People brick their PCs not with an OC... but by failing in one way or another with their hands or with their software settings and third party bullshit that gets installed on a system. People wonder why they get microstutter when there's 600 chrome tabs on the background or why the PC is so slow when they never turn it off. People who overclock generally figure stuff out and are not that crowd. That is, if you discount the base level of stupid stuff anyone can do with anything in any sort of way.
I wouldn't worry too much about it, nobody is gonna hold anything against ya (probably).
Anywho..He is the High Priest of Linuxtology, so I wouldn't be surprised. (you shouldn't take what he says very seriously, he's trolling) Yea, we don't live in the days of where you could get some insane OC's that were significant enough to consider in the value of the card. Even back then, it was kind of bullshit.First the B580 and now the 9070 / 9070XT, I'm sure Intel will come with something interesting soon hopefully, as I doubt the B580 will be the only thing part of Battlemage. No buzz about Battlemage though, I wonder why..
Because the undervolting is the best OC feature we got nowadays, so anyone shitting on it get my immediate attention. Cheers.
For paltry earnings. The guy is playing at 80fps and will start playing at 83fps to have an unstable system.