Positioning & Architecture
Finally! AMD has launched their new RDNA Radeon RX 9070 Series this week. Originally, the plan was to announce these cards at CES, but AMD changed their mind last-minute, to wait and see what NVIDIA is offering with their Blackwell architecture. Now that NVIDIA has four SKUs out, it's AMD's turn with the release of the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070. As expected, AMD is not fighting for the performance crown, i.e. there will not be a competitor to the RTX 5090. According to AMD, their focus is on providing affordable GPUs to a wide range of gamers in important market segments.

Both new cards are based on the Navi 48 graphics processor, which introduces the company's new RDNA 4 graphics architecture. Compared to RDNA 3 there has been an increased focus on ray tracing performance. The Compute Units have undergone enhancements to boost their performance, and the machine learning cores have been upgraded, too, one highlight is support for the FP8 data type. While NVIDIA has switched to GDDR7 memory for Blackwell, AMD continues to use GDDR6 memory, same as on last generation. The RX 9070 XT comes with 4096 GPU cores, the RX 9070 non-XT has 3584 (a 13% difference). Both cards feature 256-bit 16 GB VRAM and 128 ROPs, the number of RT cores is 64 and 56 respectively. As fabrication process, AMD is using TSMC's 4 nanometer N4P node, while Blackwell is still on the same 5 nm process as Ada.

Performance
We upgraded our test system in preparation for this wave of GPU launches, which is now built on AMD technology with the outstanding Ryzen 7 9800X3D. We've updated to Windows 11 24H2, complete with the newest patches and updates, and have added a selection of new games. Making a gen-over-gen comparison is slightly complicated by the fact that AMD has changed their naming scheme with this generation, to better align with the competition, which makes a lot of sense I think. I'd say the closest comparison would be RX 7900 GRE, which launched at $550, slightly cheaper than the AMD $600 MSRP of the RX 9070 XT. At 1440p, with pure rasterization, without ray tracing or DLSS, we measured a 32% performance uplift over the RX 7900 GRE, which isn't monumental, but certainly decent. At 4K, the increase is 35%, which is considerably better than what NVIDIA is offering with most GeForce RTX 50 models. Overall performance is roughly similar to the RTX 5070 Ti, which is Team Green's third-strongest model in the lineup. Another comparison is that the card sits roughly in the middle between RTX 4070 Ti Super and RTX 4080—which I think is better than what most people expected. However, this means that AMD's strongest card this generation cannot catch last generation's flagship—the RX 7900 XTX remains 3% faster, at least without ray tracing.

While most titles will run well at 4K, I think RX 9070 XT should be considered a fantastic card for 1440p gaming that has enough horsepower to explore gaming 4K, possibly with upscaling or slightly lowered settings.

Ray Tracing
While NVIDIA has been a pioneer when it comes to the introduction of the ray tracing technology, AMD hasn't really been pushing things here. This changes with RDNA 4. The new GPU is considerably faster at ray tracing, which fixes one of the biggest drawbacks of RDNA 3. Compared to NVIDIA, RT performance is still a bit lower. For example, while it was trading blows with the RTX 5070 Ti without RT, with RT the 9070 XT is 14% behind—close enough I'd say. Compared to the RTX 5070, the XT is 10% faster, more at 4K, because it has 16 GB VRAM, while the 5070 has only 12 GB. Against RDNA 3, the performance gains are impressive: +58% vs RX 7900 GRE, +18% vs RX 7900 XTX. Good job, AMD!

VRAM
AMD has equipped both RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT with 16 GB of VRAM, which is the right memory size in this segment. NVIDIA's RTX 5070 Ti has 16 GB, too, but the RTX 5070 non-Ti has only 12 GB, which becomes an issue in some titles at 4K with ray tracing and frame generation enabled. Also, looking ahead, I am convinced that future titles will come with higher VRAM requirements, which means you'll have to dial settings down a bit on the GeForce RTX 5070 (which isn't unreasonable). Still, 16 GB gives you peace of mind when it comes to VRAM.

FSR 4
With RDNA 4, AMD is introducing FSR 4—the newest version of their upscaling technology. The new tech is supported in a good number of games already, and it will come to all games supporting FSR 3.1 through a driver override mechanism. In my testing this worked well, and the UI is easy to use. I like how the in-game overlay tells you when FSR 4 is active, or warns you when you forgot to enable FSR 3.1 in the game. Image quality is greatly improved, the image stability is fantastic, almost on par with DLSS Transformer, which still remains the better option though. Rendered details in textures are much better now, too, and FSR 4 in Quality mode is comparable to native, sometimes better. Just to clarify, AMD has not made any improvements to frame generation, you still get the option to double your framerate. With Blackwell, NVIDIA has introduced multi-frame generation. This feature allows you to triple or quadruple the framerate with good results. Thus, NVIDIA still possesses a superior capability when it comes to upscaling and frame generation. However, this advantage has become much smaller. I believe the main challenge for both vendors now will be game support.

Magnetic Fans
As mentioned before, the highlight of the XFX card in this review is the magnetic fans. While other vendors offer removable shrouds, or removable fans that require careful use of a screwdriver, XFX went beyond that and lets you swap just the fan and its motor. The system works extremely well, it's by far the best experience I ever had when it comes to user-replaceable cooling. Everything is built from high-quality materials and feels well-thought-out. The strength of the magnets is enough to make sure the fans will never come off accidentally, yet they can be easily replaced without tools. This new design not only makes it easy to replace the fans should they break at some point, it's also a huge improvement when it comes to cleaning your card. Just pop the fans off, clean out all the dust and pop them back in!

Physical Design, Heat & Noise
The XFX Mercury OC impresses with a clean design that's understated yet looks powerful enough. As quad-slot design it definitely takes up some space, but that's alright, multi-GPU is dead and virtually everyone has plenty of space on their motherboard. Temperatures of the triple-fan design are excellent, the noise levels are simply too high though. With 37 dBA the card is definitely "not quiet," it's actually the loudest RTX 9070 XT out of the five cards that we've tested, by a fairly big margin. XFX did not find the right balance between fan noise and temperatures and prioritized temperatures too much. While the card does feature a dual BIOS, both BIOSes are identical, which is definitely a missed opportunity. Virtually all other vendors use a dual BIOS for a quiet BIOS option, so that you have a choice between lower temperatures or lower noise—the XFX Mercury would be an ideal candidate for that.

Our apples-to-apples noise normalized cooler comparison tests shows that the XFX cooling solution is a little bit weaker than competing designs. However, the difference is small, with only a 3.5°C gap to the best cooler—all RX 9070 XTs that we've tested so far have really strong cooling options.

PCI-Express 5.0
Just like NVIDIA Blackwell, AMD RDNA 4 has support for PCI-Express 5.0. This increases the available PCIe bandwidth to the GPU, yielding a small performance benefit. Of course PCIe Gen 5 is backwards compatible with older versions, so you'll be able to run the cards even in an older computer.

Just like we've done over the years, we took a detailed look at PCI-Express scaling in a separate article, using GeForce RTX 5090. I don't expect that results for AMD will be vastly different, so the data should be a good indicator of what to expect. Testing includes x8 Gen 5, for instances when an SSD is eating some lanes. The popular x16 4.0 was tested, which is common on many older CPUs and entry-level motherboards. Finally, some additional combinations were run, down to PCIe x16 1.1. The results confirm that unless you are on an ancient machine, PCIe bandwidth won't be a problem at all.

Power Consumption
The biggest news here for me is that AMD has finally fixed the increased power consumption in multi-monitor and video playback. In an unexpected reversal, NVIDIA is failing here now, with their top three Blackwell GPUs showing higher than expected power consumption in non-gaming states. Still, when it comes to gaming efficiency, nothing can beat NVIDIA, despite their older 5 nanometer production process. Energy efficiency of the XFX Mercury is roughly similar to last generation's RX 7900 XTX. It's a bit surprising that AMD hasn't made significant improvements here, but you have to consider that the Mercury is factory-overclocked. The non-OC Sapphire Pulse is around 10% more efficient, which helps, but isn't enough to catch NVIDIA. Still, overall PSU requirements are not problematic at all, so all good.

Out of all the cards tested today, the XFX card has a very high power limit, which yields a little bit of extra performance and could come in useful when pushing the card to the max with overclocking.

Overclocking
Overclocking worked very well on all RX 9070 Series cards. The XFX Mercury gained 10% in real-life performance, which is more than we usually see. NVIDIA's competing Blackwell cards overclock a few percent better though. While OC isn't completely trivial it's easy enough to do, once you know what to look out for. I also like that AMD continues giving us the Hot Spot thermal sensor, which can be crucial to diagnose issues with thermal paste or cooler alignment. Also, the OC slider limits are high enough to not result in any artificial limitations.

Pricing & Alternatives
AMD has declared a $600 MSRP for the RX 9070 XT, which is very ambitious. At that price point it's the best option in its segment by far, unless your main focus is on DLSS multi-frame-generation, or you need CUDA for GPU computing. Cards went up on sale yesterday, and they all sold out within minutes. There was some supply at MSRP, but the majority of cards sells for more than that, all the way up to $850. The XFX Mercury OC Magnetic Air in today's review is listed online for $800, but of course it's sold out like every other RX 9070 or GeForce RTX 50 GPU. These are terrible times if you want a new graphics card. I'm also shocked that XFX is pricing their card at a 33% premium over the AMD baseline price. At that price point you'll be much better off with a Radeon RX 7900 XT or 7900 GRE in terms of value, but these are last-gen with lower RT performance. Team Green's new GPU releases are even more expensive, with the RTX 5070 selling for over $800 on eBay.

Even at $800 it's not like there's a lot of alternatives available at this time. Of course, if you can find an MSRP RX 9070 XT for $600, definitely go for that—but the chances are slim. I'm not sure if I'd pick a RTX 4070 Ti 12 GB for $750 instead, maybe a RTX 4070 Ti Super, but those sell for over $900 at the moment—not really a bargain option. RTX 5070 Ti sounds good on paper, MSRP $750, real price $1000.

Looking to the future, we have RTX 5060 series and RX 9060 series on the horizon—I doubt that these will be able to make any difference for buyers interested in strong 1440p cards. Maybe Intel has an ace up their sleeves, their bigger Arc Battlemage cards could add more competition, but the release date is completely unknown.