Introduction

AMD's next generation of gaming graphics cards is here to breathe life into a market stiflingly inflated prices, and we have with us the Sapphire Radeon RX 9070 XT NITRO+. The NITRO line of graphics cards represents the very best in graphics card design by Sapphire, one of AMD's oldest and most important board partners, and given that the RX 9070 XT is the top-spec part from the RX 9000 series, the company has thrown everything and the kitchen sink into this product. The Radeon RX 9070 XT is a performance-segment graphics card that AMD claims is capable of 4K Ultra HD gaming. The company goes as far as to claim that this GPU has "everything you need" for that resolution, at a confidence-inspiring starting price of $600, which is slightly above that of the GeForce RTX 5070 that NVIDIA is launching today.



The Radeon RX 9070 XT is powered by RDNA 4, the fourth generation of the RDNA graphics architecture that has seen AMD's return to competitiveness in the gaming GPU market. The RX 5000 series had enough performance to disrupt RTX 20-series Turing, causing it to launch the RTX 20 Super series; the RX 6000 RDNA 2 series was commercially a heyday for AMD, as that's when the crypto mining boom soaked up all premium and enthusiast GPUs, while the products themselves squared off well against NVIDIA's RTX 30-series Ampere. The RX 7000 series powered by RDNA 3 fell sightly behind in competitiveness, and AMD identified a crucial reason—naming.

While the RX 6800 XT performed in the same league as the RTX 3080 and ray tracing performance wasn't a big differentiator, its successor, the RX 7800 XT was significantly slower than the RTX 4080, which wasn't just faster but also priced nearly double that of the AMD card. Meanwhile, gamers began more direct comparisons between AMD and NVIDIA SKUs based on naming, and found that even the RTX 4070 Ti was a faster pick than the RX 7800 XT. AMD had to come up with the RX 7900 GRE, which offered comparable performance at a better priced, but only compounded the problem of naming—you now had an RX 7900 series product compete with an RTX 4070 series. It is to address exactly this, that AMD decided to give its gaming GPU series a significant change with product naming.

The Radeon RX 9070 XT is part of the Radeon 9000 series, and within it, is a xx70-segment product. Its name guides gamers to compare it with the RTX 5070 and the RTX 5070 Ti, although at a starting price of $600, the company aims to offer better performance than the RTX 5070 at better price-performance than the RTX 5070 Ti, which starts at $750. With the RX 9000 series, AMD is withdrawing from the enthusiast segment. It's hard to speculate why, but this means that the company gets to flex its engineering muscle at making the RX 9070 XT at least a segment-best GPU.

The RDNA 4 graphics architecture is purpose built for two things—to pack the most performance per mm² die-area, and to allow AMD to wage price-wars against the RTX 5070 series SKUs. The company claims a significant increase in performance-per-CU over the previous RDNA 3 architecture, with which it can achieve its performance targets using 64 CU spread across 4 shader engines. The company also claims a 100% increase in ray tracing performance over RDNA 3, which should reduce the performance cost of ray tracing. There is a similar leap in AI acceleration throughput, now close to 1600 AI TOPS, paving the way for FSR 4, the biggest upgrade to the FSR suite of performance enhancements. FSR 4 uses a new AI ML-based upscaler that offers superior image quality at every performance preset.

The Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 that we're also reviewing today, share a common silicon, the 4 nm Navi 48, which the RX 9070 XT maxes out. Unlike NVIDIA, which stuck to the exact same process node for the Blackwell generation as the Ada generation, AMD gave the Navi 48 two key process-level upgrades. Firstly, the company switched to the 4 nm TSMC N4P node, which offers clock speed and efficiency upgrades over the previous TSMC N5 node, and secondly, Navi 48 is a monolithic silicon unlike Navi 32, which was a chiplet-based GPU with a 5 nm GCD and 6 nm MCDs. The entire Navi 48 chip is made on 4 nm, including the memory controllers and Infinity Cache, and then there are power management and IPC improvements from the RDNA 4 architecture.

The Navi 48 silicon features 64 RDNA 4 compute units (CU), all of which are enabled on the RX 9070 XT. This works out to 4,096 stream processors, 128 AI accelerators, 64 RT accelerators, 256 TMUs, and 128 ROPs (an increase over the 96 ROPs than the Navi 32 came with). The card comes with 16 GB of memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface, although what's interesting is that AMD stuck with older GDDR6 memory standard, using 20 Gbps memory speeds, which results in 640 GB/s of memory bandwidth. AMD is counting on new architecture-level features, such as out-of-order memory management, and the 64 MB Infinity Cache, to keep the RX 9070 series competitive with the GeForce RTX 5070 series.

The Sapphire Radeon RX 9070 XT NITRO+ comes with a stunning custom design that looks like it's a piece of jewellery. The triple-slot cooling solution features a dense aluminium fin-stack heatsink, and a premium high-conductivity TIM. This is probably the only premium custom design RX 9070 XT to implement a 16-pin 12V-2x6 power input, which is neatly tucked away, more on this in the picture pages. The NITRO+ also comes with a generous amount of RGB LED lighting in the form of a large RGB diffuser that spans the length of the card. The card comes with factory overclocked speeds of 2520 MHz Game clock, a generous increase over the 2400 MHz reference. Sapphire is pricing the Radeon RX 9070 XT NITRO+ at $730, a $130 premium over the $600 starting price for the RX 9070 XT.