Preview Conclusion

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 are expected to go on sale on the 6th of March 2025, with the RX 9070 XT priced at $600 and the RX 9070 at $550. With the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti starting at $750 and with its real-world pricing nearing four-figures, AMD has a golden opportunity to undercut the RTX 5070 Ti, should the RX 9070 XT end up with competitive performance. The same goes for the RX 9070, and how it could square off against the RTX 5070, again, if AMD's performance claims hold. We cannot talk about our ongoing testing of these cards, yet, and you'll have to wait for our reviews in March.

When it launches, the Radeon RX 9070 series will come to you purely as custom-design cards. There is no reference design that partners can rebadge and sell, a huge change from past generations. We don't know whether this means AMD will sell custom design cards on its web store, or no GPUs at all. There is something resembling a reference design in the press decks, but it's confined to them and looks like a render only. Among the partners you can expect cards from are Sapphire, PowerColor, XFX, ASRock, Yeston, Vastamor, ASUS, Acer, and Gigabyte. We consider this a confirmation that MSI is no longer an AMD board partner.

The RDNA 4 graphics architecture is designed for one thing only—to give AMD the ability to wage serious price wars against NVIDIA. The RX 9070 XT is coming in at $600, and the RX 9070 at $550. Should there be a price-war with the RTX 5070 series, we can expect AMD to drag prices all the way down to below $350. We attribute this to the fact that the Navi 48 silicon is a lean monolithic chip, it's paired with older-generation GDDR6 memory that is cheap, and the two SKUs have 220 W to 300 W board power values that can be reached with fairly simple VRM configurations.

In pursuit of just that goal—gaining market share through fiercely competitive pricing, the RDNA 4 architecture delivers massive performance gains per CU, at least on paper, which is how AMD is able to chase down performance levels achieved by previous-generation RX 7900 series enthusiast-class GPUs in the performance-segment.


Will the lack of a "big Navi" based on RDNA 4 hurt AMD? Not besides the loss in revenue from the >$1000 segment. The new nomenclature makes it easier for customers to identify the RX 9070 series as competition to the RTX 5070 series, and to expect performance in that segment. This is a high volume segment, and so AMD should cover a big chunk of the PC gaming hardware market with RDNA 4. But can AMD theoretically create a "Big Navi"? We don't see why not. AMD is known for cowboy engineering as we've seen with examples such as the Radeon VII and R9 Fury/Nano, where it creates big GPUs out of nowhere in the middle of a product lifecycle.

RDNA 4 makes big strides in the three most crucial areas the company was lagging behind NVIDIA on—performance cost of ray tracing, path tracing, and an AI-based image upscaling algorithm for FSR that provides higher image quality. DLSS is no longer "technologically superior to FSR." Lowering the performance cost of ray tracing means that RT can more readily be standardized in games. The company left the door open on two questions—neural rendering, and multi frame generation. FSR 4 is designed to support neural rendering, and AMD is probably working on implementing the technology, now that Microsoft has standardized it. AMD can technically implement multi frame generation, given that its display engine supports flip-metering, that gives GPU fine-grained ability to pace frames.

As for performance, looking at the graphs AMD put out, and accounting for PR gimmicks, we give the RX 9070 XT a realistic chance at competing with the GeForce RTX 5070 series, slotting in somewhere between the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070, while the RX 9070 could perform close to the RTX 5070 and the upcoming RTX 5060 Ti. To be clear, we haven't tested the RTX 5070, can't talk about our ongoing testing of the RX 9070 series, and have no clue what the RTX 5060 Ti performs like, this is purely guesswork on our part, based on the AMD press deck.

To conclude this preview, the RX 9070 series should bring much needed sanity to graphics card pricing, should AMD's performance claims hold up. AMD told us in our post-CES roundtable that it is gunning for one thing and one thing only—market-share. If these GPUs are available, and in good volumes, AMD is in for some decent gains in the PC gaming market.