ASUS Radeon RX 9070 TUF OC Review

Name: ASUS Radeon RX 9070 TUF OC
Brand: ASUS
Price: 650 USD

W1zzard

on Mar 5th, 2025,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: ASUS

(79 Comments) »

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.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Cores	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
RTX 3080	$420	8704	96	1440 MHz	1710 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit
RTX 4070	$490	5888	64	1920 MHz	2475 MHz	1313 MHz	AD104	35800M	12 GB, GDDR6X, 192-bit
RX 7800 XT	$440	3840	96	2124 MHz	2430 MHz	2425 MHz	Navi 32	28100M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6900 XT	$450	5120	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6950 XT	$630	5120	128	2100 MHz	2310 MHz	2250 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3090	$900	10496	112	1395 MHz	1695 MHz	1219 MHz	GA102	28000M	24 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit
RTX 4070 Super	$590	7168	80	1980 MHz	2475 MHz	1313 MHz	AD104	35800M	12 GB, GDDR6X, 192-bit
RX 7900 GRE	$530	5120	160	1880 MHz	2245 MHz	2250 MHz	Navi 31	57700M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 4070 Ti	$700	7680	80	2310 MHz	2610 MHz	1313 MHz	AD104	35800M	12 GB, GDDR6X, 192-bit
RTX 5070	$550	6144	80	2325 MHz	2512 MHz	1750 MHz	GB205	31100M	12 GB, GDDR7, 192-bit
RTX 4070 Ti Super	$750	8448	112	2340 MHz	2610 MHz	1313 MHz	AD103	45900M	16 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RX 7900 XT	$620	5376	192	2000 MHz	2400 MHz	2500 MHz	Navi 31	57700M	20 GB, GDDR6, 320-bit
RX 9070	$550	3584	128	2070 MHz	2520 MHz	2518 MHz	Navi 48	53900M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
ASUS RX 9070 TUF OC	$650 (estimated)	3584	128	2170 MHz	2650 MHz	2518 MHz	Navi 48	53900M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 9070 XT	$600	4096	128	2400 MHz	2970 MHz	2518 MHz	Navi 48	53900M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3090 Ti	$1000	10752	112	1560 MHz	1950 MHz	1313 MHz	GA102	28000M	24 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit
RTX 5070 Ti	$750	8960	96	2295 MHz	2452 MHz	1750 MHz	GB203	45600M	16 GB, GDDR7, 256-bit
RX 7900 XTX	$820	6144	192	2300 MHz	2500 MHz	2500 MHz	Navi 31	57700M	24 GB, GDDR6, 384-bit
RTX 4080	$940	9728	112	2205 MHz	2505 MHz	1400 MHz	AD103	45900M	16 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RTX 4080 Super	$990	10240	112	2295 MHz	2550 MHz	1438 MHz	AD103	45900M	16 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RTX 5080	$1000	10752	112	2295 MHz	2617 MHz	1875 MHz	GB203	45600M	16 GB, GDDR7, 256-bit
RTX 4090	$2400	16384	176	2235 MHz	2520 MHz	1313 MHz	AD102	76300M	24 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit
RTX 5090	$2000	21760	176	2017 MHz	2407 MHz	1750 MHz	GB202	92200M	32 GB, GDDR7, 512-bit

AMD RDNA 4 Architecture

The new Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 are powered by the 4 nm Navi 48 silicon. Unlike Navi 31 and Navi 32 before it, this is a traditional monolithic die built entirely on the TSMC N4P (4 nm EUV) process node. It has an area of 356.5 mm², but with an impressive transistor count of 53.9 billion. To put this number into context, the previous "big Navi" GPU, Navi 31 powering the RX 7900 XTX, has 57.8 billion transistors (just 8% more), despite having 96 CU, a larger Infinity Cache, and a wider 384-bit memory bus. The Navi 31 has a die area of 529 mm² (304 mm² for the 5 nm GCD, with the rest being 6 nm MCDs), so you can see the kind of strides AMD made with die-area. At the top-level, the Navi 48 features a PCI-Express 5.0 x16 host interface, and a 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory bus. With 20 Gbps GDDR6 memory chips, the RX 9070 XT gets 640 GB/s of memory bandwidth. This is made up for with a faster 64 MB Infinity Cache, and a critical improvement AMD made to its memory management system, called Out-of-Order Memory Queuing.

The Navi 48 silicon physically has 64 CU spread across 4 shader engines. With each CU containing 64 stream processors, the chip has a total of 4,096 stream processors. All 64 CU are enabled on the RX 9070 XT, while the RX 9070 has 56 out of 64 of them enabled. The maxed-out Navi 48 contains 4,096 stream processors, 128 AI accelerators, 64 RT accelerators, 256 TMUs, and 128 ROPs. The chip also features 64 MB of 3rd Gen Infinity Cache, and a 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, driving 16 GB of 20 Gbps memory on both the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070. With 56 CU enabled on the RX 9070, it has 3,584 stream processors, 112 AI accelerators, 56 RT accelerators, 224 TMUs, and an untouched ROP count of 128, besides the exact same memory configuration as the RX 9070 XT.

At the heart of the RDNA 4 graphics architecture is the new dual compute unit, with a vastly improved memory sub-system, improvements made to the scalar units, a new technology called dynamic register allocation, and improvements to CU efficiency and engine clocks. Each CU has two scheduler blocks, driving a 192 KB general purpose register (GPR), an 8 KB scalar GPR, 32 FMA ALUs, and 32 FMA+INT ALUs. There are also 8 transcendental logic units. RDNA 4 introduces the concept of dual SIMD32 vector units, for even more parallelism. The Scalar Unit comes with support for newer Float32 ops. Schedulers are updated with accelerated spill/fill operations. Instruction prefetching is improved. The new generation AI Accelerator comes with two 16-bit and four 8-bit/4-bit dense matrix compute rates, support for 4:2 structured sparsity for doubling throughput, and matrix loads with transpose. AMD has incorporated many technologies from its CDNA 3 Instinct AI ML accelerators on the AI Accelerators of RDNA 4, including enhanced and power-optimized WMMA, improvements to the ops per CU, support for FP8, E4M3 and E5M2 formats, and 4:2 structured sparsity.

The new generation AI Accelerator comes with two 16-bit and four 8-bit/4-bit dense matrix compute rates, support for 4:2 structured sparsity for doubling throughput, and matrix loads with transpose. AMD has incorporated many technologies from its CDNA 3 Radeon Instinct AI ML accelerators on the AI Accelerators of RDNA 4, including enhanced and power-optimized WMMA, improvements to the ops per CU, support for FP8, E4M3 and E5M2 formats, and 4:2 structured sparsity.

The new generation Ray Accelerator comes with double the box and triangle intersection resources as RDNA 3 RT accelerator, support for hardware instance transforms, improvements to the RT stack management, BVH8 node compression, and a revolutionary feature called oriented bounding boxes. To contain the number of rays really needed to be tested against an object, modern ray tracing technologies use something called a bounding box, which defines a region in which a geometry has to be tested against rays. Most of the time, the geometry is of a vastly different shape and smaller than the shape of a bounding box, which introduces false intersections, and wastes ray testing resources. AMD innovated a way to turn this bounding box into a 3D shape by giving it a Z-axis component, so the bounding box is oriented closer to the shape of the object to be tested, reducing the number of rays needed to be tested against it.

This graph highlights the contribution of various components toward the 100% generational ray traversal performance gain, allowing AMD to make do with a CU count of 64, with RDNA 3 being the baseline.

Both ray tracing and ML acceleration are memory sensitive applications, and so AMD innovated a revolutionary change to its memory management system, with the introduction of new out-of-order memory. All math is executed in waves on an RDNA GPU, and mutual dependencies between waves can cause memory request stream misses, as one wave's memory request queue waits for the other wave to complete its task. This is solved with a new out-of-order (relaxed ordering) memory management. This graph highlights the contribution of various components toward the 100% generational ray traversal performance gain, allowing AMD to make do with a CU count of 64, with RDNA 3 being the baseline.

On AMD, a fairly big chunk of the ray tracing stack continues to be executed on shaders, but the company has made advances to ensure the cost of ray tracing on the shader resources of the GPU, with the introduction of Dynamic Registers, to improve parallelism.

The new Radiance 2 Display Engine comes with major hardware updates that reduce GPU idle power draw in multi-monitor setups. The engine also comes with hardware flip-metering support (something NVIDIA also introduced with Blackwell, and which enables Multi-Frame Gen on the RTX 50-series). Flip-metering improves video frame pacing to the GPU and reduces CPU overhead for video playback. There is also a display engine level hardware image sharpening component that drives Radeon Image Sharpening. As for I/O, you get contemporary DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1b, the maximum bitrate is UHBR 13.5.

Navi 48 comes with a dual media engine, each of the two can perform concurrent encoding and decoding, and so the implementation resembles an NVIDIA GPU having two each of NVENC and NVDEC units. The new generation media engine offers a 25% increase in H.264 low-latency encode quality, and an 11% improvement in HEVC encode quality. AV1 encode and decode get B-frames support, vastly improving bitrates. The media engine posts a 50% generational performance uplift (measured in encoder/decoder frame rates), with reductions in memory overhead.

AMD FSR 4 and New AMD Software Features

With the Radeon RX 9000 series, AMD is debuting FSR 4, the latest version of its performance enhancement suite. FSR 4 introduces the biggest tech update since FSR 2, which also makes it exclusive to the RX 9000 series. With the RDNA 4 generation of GPUs offering significantly higher ML compute throughput, AMD designed a new ML-based upscaler to reconstruct details of the upscaled frame. In that sense, FSR 4 is technologically close to DLSS. RDNA 4 GPUs also leverage AI DNNs to de-noise ray tracing and path tracing, unburdening the shaders.

An AI ML based upscaler requires ground truth data, and just as NVIDIA goes through the painstaking task of training game-specific ML models that can later be shipped to end-users through game developers and as driver updates; AMD has set up a large FSR 4 data-center of its own, powered by Radeon Instinct MI300-series AI GPUs for the task. On the client side, the ML-based upscaler needs the dedicated AI acceleration hardware from the RDNA 4 family. The frame generation technology appears to be carried over from FSR 3 Frame Generation, and is essentially a smart frame interpolation technology.

AMD in its presentation provided examples of image quality for FSR 4, claiming that in some cases, FSR 4 presents geometry more accurately than even native resolution. While AMD didn't detail it, FSR 4 comes with preparation for neural rendering. Given that Microsoft has now standardized neural shaders, and the ability for applications to directly address AI acceleration hardware on the GPU via the DirectX API, AMD could in the near future implement neural rendering, however, the company hasn't detailed a timeline. FSR 4 is ready for neural rendered objects.

Fluid Motion Frames gets an update with FMF 2.1, with improved image quality, reduced ghosting, and improved temporal tracking. The company also updated its API-agnostic image sharpening tool, with the introduction of Radeon Image Sharpening 2 (RIS 2).

AMD provides a slick driver frontend application called simply "AMD Software." AMD improved the way in which users can report bugs, artifacts, or corruption in games, through a voluntary (opt-in) feature called AMD Image Inspector.

As you submit a screenshot or video sequence to AMD, the company uses an AI model to identify rendering bugs, or corruption in the display. The entire driver-level game optimization, testing, and bug fixing process has been revamped with AI doing the heavy lifting.

The company also introduced AMD Chat, which is an AI chatbot that runs locally, and is accelerated by the GPU. You can make plain language queries on configuring AMD Software features and settings; and also chat with it on AMD technologies. This is essentially AMD's answer to NVIDIA's ChatRTX, but we don't know if the utility can be trained with custom datasets.

For streamers, AMD Software simplifies connecting their gameplay with their social media and streaming accounts. You can then take advantage of the new dual media engine of RDNA 4 that improves H.264 and HEVC image quality, and use other utilities such as AMD Noise Suppression, which is a 2-way AI-based audio filter.

AMD AI Apps Manager consolidates all your AI applications into a simple launcher-like interface resembling a game launcher.

Packaging

The Card

Visually, the ASUS RTX 9070 TUF OC follows the design theme of the company's previous TUF cards, and it also matches the GeForce 50 TUF visuals exactly. On the back you get a high quality metal backplate with a cutout for air to flow through.

Dimensions of the card are 33.0 x 14.0 cm, and it weighs 1435 g.

Installation requires three slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 60 mm.

Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 2.1a and a HDMI 2.1b.

With RDNA 4, AMD put effort to improve its standing with game streamers and creative professionals. It's done this by giving Navi 48 a dual VCN solution, so the GPU has two concurrent hardware accelerators for encoding and decoding. Perhaps the biggest changes at the silicon level is that AMD improved the encoding quality of its hardware H.264 and HEVC codecs. This was a niche complaint streamers had with AMD GPUs, and would avoid the brand altogether. The company also updated its AV1 hardware acceleration with support for B-frames, which are frames that lack image information, but math data that let the decoder reconstruct image data by comparing with the image data from adjacent I-frames containing it. This technique vastly improves streaming bitrates since half the frames lack image data.