The Cards

Today AMD is announcing only the top Radeon RX 9070 series from this generation. The two aim to provide an enthusiast-class gaming experience in the performance segment at prices that could disrupt NVIDIA's performance-segment offerings from the RTX 5070 series. Historically, the xx70 series have sold in large volumes, and AMD itself has had a track record of unsettling NVIDIA in this segment with the original RDNA RX 5700 series versus the RTX 20-series, so the company could be on to something.


The series consists of just two SKUs for now, the top $600 Radeon RX 9070 XT, and the next-best $550 Radeon RX 9070, both are performance-segment products based on a common silicon, the 4 nm Navi 48.


The Navi 48 silicon is technically a performance-segment chip, logically its predecessors would have to be the Navi 32, the Navi 22, and the Navi 10, but there's more to this story because AMD changed the nomenclature of Radeon RX with this generation.


The Navi 48 silicon physically has 64 compute units, and a 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory bus driving 16 GB of memory on both cards. The RX 9070 XT maxes it out, enabling all 64 CUs (4,096 stream processors), and the highest possible clock speeds, while the RX 9070 gets 56 CU (3,584 stream processors).

The RX 9070 XT also comes with 128 AI accelerators, and 64 RT accelerators, besides 512 TMUs and 128 ROPs. The RX 9070, on the other hand, offers 112 AI accelerators, 56 RT accelerators, 448 TMUs, and 128 ROPs. The RX 9070 XT boosts up to 2.97 GHz, while the RX 9070 goes up to 2.52 GHz.


The RX 9070 XT has a power limit of 304 W, making it possible for both reference-spec and overclocked cards to make do with just two class 8-pin PCIe power connectors, while the RX 9070 has a total board power of just 220 W, making it technically possible for compact cards with a single 8-pin power connector.

The Navi 48 silicon is AMD's first gaming GPU to implement PCI-Express 5.0, both SKUs come with a PCI-Express 5.0 x16 host interface that's backwards-compatible with all older generations of PCIe. The display I/O remains contemporary, with DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1b, making it possible to drive 8K displays with a single cable.

New Naming Scheme

With the RX 9000 series, AMD has changed the naming scheme of its gaming GPU SKUs. AMD says that this has been done to make it easier for customers to identify a product from a performance class, and to compare the SKUs better with "the competition's" (NVIDIA's). The RX 9070 series would logically be AMD's analog to the GeForce RTX 5070 series, with the RX 9070 XT squaring off against the RTX 5070 Ti, and the RX 9070 against the upcoming RTX 5070.

Had AMD stuck with the old naming scheme, the RX 9070 XT would have to be named something along the lines of the "RX 9800 XT," and the RX 9070 something like the "RX 9700 XT," causing some kinds of buyers compare the "RX 9700 XT" with the RTX 5070 Ti and the "RX 9800 XT" with the RTX 5080, and find both lagging in performance and hence undesirable. This is essentially what happened with the RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT, compared to the RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Ti, respectively. The new naming scheme fixes this.