AMD's First Party Performance Claims

When we got news that AMD won't design a "big Navi" based on RDNA 4, we had almost written off the company as an A-tier gaming GPU maker. The company tends to have such cycles of reclusion from the high-end, as we'd seen with the RX 400 Polaris. AMD's performance claims, however, offer more than a glimmer that AMD is out to eat NVIDIA's lunch in the high-volume performance-segment, and losing out on the enthusiast-segment shouldn't dent its bottom line by much.


For the top Radeon RX 9070 XT, AMD is claiming a 51% gain in gaming performance over the RX 6900 XT, its fastest GPU from the RDNA 2 generation, and 26% faster performance from the RTX 3090, which was the fastest GPU in that generation. These are averaged across over 30 games. AMD is claiming a 42% average performance gain over the RX 7900 GRE at 4K, however, this claim includes averages of ray tracing performance, where the company made big gains. Ditto with 1440p, where the claim is +38%. Unlike NVIDIA, which refuses to market the RTX 5070 Ti as a 4K gaming product, AMD makes no such pretences, the RX 9070 XT is being pushed for both 4K and 1440p use cases.


Moving on to the RX 9070 (non-XT), and we're shown a 21% performance gain over the RX 7900 GRE at 4K (again, including averages from RT titles); and a 20% gain over the RX 7900 GRE at 1440p.


Here are some quick performance gains for Hyper-RX. This is a quick-and-easy toggle for a number of performance enhancements, and so the performance gains are nothing unexpected.

FSR 4 can provide an up to 3.4x performance uplift as shown in this Space Marine II example.


This graph shows how in the absence of any enthusiast-segment GPU, the RX 9070 XT makes for a formidable 4K-class GPU, with a little help from FSR 4 and Frame Generation, of course.


With RX 7900 GRE as base, you can see how generative AI performance gets a massive generational boost.