Introduction

ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon RX 9070 OC is the company's premium custom-design rendition of the new performance segment graphics card from AMD. The new RX 9070 launches today at a starting price of $550, positioned as a value alternative to the top RX 9070 XT part, although for the price at which the ASUS TUF Gaming card is going to market, you should be able to find an RX 9070 XT. This is thanks to the wafer thin $50 gap between the two SKUs, leaving ASUS with no room to squeeze in a premium custom design. The RX 9070 is designed for maxed out gaming at 1440p, including with ray tracing. Not only does it share its $550 MSRP, but also launch date, with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070.



Let's address the elephant in the room, and that is product naming. AMD has made a tactical retreat from the enthusiast segment, wanting to focus instead on the sub-$1,000 performance and mainstream segments. In fact, its top SKU in this generation, the RX 9070 XT, starts only at $600. Both the RX 9070 XT and the RX 9070 we're reviewing here, are named such that consumers compare them to the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070, respectively.

Both cards are based on a common silicon, the Navi 48, which is built on the 4 nm TSMC N4P foundry node. Unlike NVIDIA, made a minor upgrade from the 5 nm TSMC N5. Unlike the 5 nm + 6 nm chiplet-based design of the Navi 32, the Navi 48 is a monolithic 4 nm silicon. The N4P node brings frequency and power advantages over the N5. All generational performance-per-watt uplifts will be attributable not just to the new graphics architecture, but also the fact that the entire silicon—including memory controllers and Infinity Cache—are built on the 4 nm node.

The new RDNA 4 graphics architecture is purpose built for the performance segment, so AMD could pack the most performance at its target price points. The company claims to have achieved significant gains in performance over RDNA 3 in performance per compute unit. The company also posted its biggest generational gains in ray tracing performance, thanks to updated to the RT accelerator; as well as gains in performance of its AI accelerators. In fact, the AI acceleration performance enabled AMD to innovate FSR 4, the biggest upgrade to the company's gaming performance enhancement suite, giving it AI ML-based upscalers and frame generation that offers significant improvements in image quality at every performance preset.

The Radeon RX 9070 is carved out of the Navi 48 silicon by enabling 56 out of 64 compute units present on the silicon, which works out to 3,584 stream processors, 112 AI accelerators, and 56 RT accelerators. The chip also gets 224 TMUs, and the chip's full complement of 128 ROPs, as well as, all 64 MB of Infinity Cache. Perhaps the most striking design choice by AMD is not doing what it did to the RX 7700 XT, and instead giving the RX 9070 the exact same memory configuration as the RX 9070 XT. That's right, you get 16 GB of memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface. What is disappointing, though, is that this is still older generation 20 Gbps GDDR6, which yields 640 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Our recent RTX 5070 testing has shown that memory size trumps bandwidth in ray tracing workloads, and AMD has given the RX 9070 a larger on-die cache than the 48 MB NVIDIA gave the RTX 5070, so things could get interesting.

The ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon RX 9070 OC comes with the latest generation TUF Gaming board design that the company introduced with the GeForce RTX 50-series. Given that there is no ROG Strix branded RX 9000 series product, this would be the company's top custom design SKU. Besides a heavy triple-slot cooling solution, the TUF Gaming comes with a generous factory OC of 2170 MHz, up from the 2050 MHz reference. The memory ticks at 20 Gbps (GDDR6 effective). The Vented Exoskeleton cooling solution by ASUS is designed to maximize exposure of the heatsink to the outside, for the best possible ventilation. It also packs three of the latest Axial-Tech fans by the company. ASUS has been unable to provide any pricing for the RX 9070 TUF OC, we estimate it at around $650, and will update this review accordingly, once it's revealed.