Introduction

The next generation of AMD Radeon is here! The company today formally announced its Radeon RX 9070 series of performance-segment graphics cards, powered by the new RDNA 4 graphics architecture. These new cards aim to provide gamers with premium performance to max out any of today's games at resolutions of up to 4K UHD; the company also claims to have made massive strides in AI acceleration, ray tracing, and energy efficiency. The series marks AMD reorienting itself as a high performance/cost gaming GPU vendor, targeting price points PC gamers are more familiar with and want their graphics cards at; rather than runaway increase in GPU prices each generation. In many ways, AMD's strategy appears closer to that of Intel's than NVIDIA's. The RX 9070 XT comes at a starting price of $600, with the RX 9070 at $550.



AMD famously gave its Radeon 9000 series and RDNA 4 a skip at its 2025 International CES keynote address despite the two being part of pre-briefs to the press. Speculation was rife that the new series could fall woefully behind NVIDIA Blackwell, forcing AMD to fight for crumbs at the entry level with Intel. Then, something interesting happened—NVIDIA chose to build Blackwell on the same foundry node as the previous generation, going back to 2022, and the RTX 50-series SKUs launched so far don't post the kind of generational performance gains we've come to expect from NVIDIA, which the RTX 40-series Ada did. For instance, the RTX 5080 does not beat the RTX 4090, whereas even the RTX 4070 Ti beat the RTX 3090.

With RDNA 4, AMD has made a tactical retreat from the enthusiast segment. There is not going to be a "big Navi" GPU based on RDNA 4, and the Navi 48 chip powering the RX 9070 series will be the biggest chip this generation. With this, AMD will look to throw everything it has to bringing the most amount of performance and value out of its RX 9070 series, and look to target price points undercutting NVIDIA's performance-segment SKUs such as the recently announced RTX 5070 Ti, and the upcoming RTX 5070. It is unencumbered from the burden of beating the RTX 5090 or even the RTX 5080, which are both impossible to find at three-figure prices. Given that the real world pricing of the RTX 5070 Ti, particularly the custom OC cards are nearing $1,000, AMD has a great opportunity to disrupt the performance segment of the RTX 50-series the way the RX 5700 XT did for the RTX 20-series.

In this article, we will walk you through the new graphics cards AMD is launching soon, the RDNA 4 graphics architecture powering it, and what's new on the software and gamer experience side of things, particularly with FSR 4 and AMD Software.