AMD RX 9070 review vs RTX 5070, 4070, and RX 9070 XT, 7800 XT — Just good enough.

When AMD reached out to us back at the start of March asking if we were interested in testing the Radeon RX 9070 XT, they also gave us the RX 9070. Both are Sapphire Pulse cards, but due to time constraints and other factors, we were unable to share our opinion of it, until now.

We will be pitching it against the data we already have for the 9070 XT, but also the NVIDIA 5070 FE, MSI GeForce RTX 4070 VENTUS 2X 12G, and Gigabyte Radeon RX 7800 XT GAMING OC 16G seeing as they are in a similar price class and also because AMD has pitted it against 70-series GeForce GPUs and now we have data from both this gen and last gen series of 70-series cards.

Before we get underway, this is a collaboration between Steven Parker, and Sayan Sen who provided the benchmark graphics and input on the data points I collected during benchmarking.

First up, the specs of the 9070, and 9070 XT which were given to us by AMD, as well as our self-bought NVIDIA RTX 5070 FE (note that the specs of AMD and Nvidia are not directly comparable):

	Radeon RX 9070	Radeon RX 9070 XT	Nvidia RTX 5070 FE
Boost Clock: Game Clock:	up to 2.52GHz up to 2.07GHz	up to 2.97GHz up to 2.40GHz	up to 2.33Ghz up to 2.51GHz
Stream Processors	3,584 (56 CU)	4,096 (64 CU)	6,134 (48 SM)
Ray Accelerator	56	64	48
AI Accelerator	112	128	192
ROPs	64		80
Texture Mapping Units	224	256	192
Memory	16 GB GDDR6, 20Gbps Clock, 256-bit Bus Effective Memory Bandwidth: 640 GB/s		12GB GDDR7, 28Gbps, 192-bit Bus 672 GB/sec
Infinity Cache	64 MB (3rd Gen)		48 MB
Card Bus	PCI-E 5.0 X16		PCI-E 5.0 X16
Output	2x HDMI 2.1b 2x DisplayPort 2.1a		1x HDMI 2.1b 3x DisplayPort 2.1b
Power consumption	220W	304W	250W
Recommended PSU	650W	750W	600W
Slot width	2x	3x	2x
Price (MSRP)	$549	$599	$549

AMD Pricing hell

The list price according to AMD is given as $549 for the 9070 XT, and $599 for the 9070 XT when they launched at the start of March, but as we have seen, card manufacturers immediately inflated pricing for both cards.

If we go by Newegg's pricing for the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, it is possible to snag a 9070 for $549, but the cheapest 9070 XT currently listed on Newegg is a Gigabyte Gaming Radeon RX 9070 XT at $60 over MSRP for $659 (and is currently out of stock). To make matters worse, the most expensive XT is a SAPPHIRE NITRO+ Radeon RX 9070 XT listed for $1,297.96, which puts it in 7900 XTX (which can be found cheaper), and NVIDIA 5080 territory.

Design

Moving on, the Sapphire Pulse is a dual fan, dual slot design with two 8-pin connectors, and at 28cm will fit in most systems easily, even though it dwarfes our 5070 FE in size. There is no RGB on the RX 9070 either, not even the naming on the side lights up, which is a shame, considering it is priced $200 over MSRP at $749 on Newegg.

The Sapphire Pulse RX 9070 from all angles.

As you may remember from our 9070 XT review, the 9070 looks pretty much the same as the Sapphire Pulse RX 9070 XT with the main differences being dual fan, dual slot versus triple fan, triple slot on the XT variant which significantly reduces its overall size versus the XT variant.

Test system

Our test system consists of the following:

• Cooler Master MasterBox NR200P MAX
• ASRock Z790 PG-ITX/TB4
• Intel Core i7-14700K with Thermal Grizzly Carbonaut Pad
• T-FORCE Delta RGB DDR5 (2x16GB) 7600MT/s CL36 (XMP Profile)
• 2TB Kingston Fury Renegade SSD
• Windows 11 24H2 (Build 26100.3194)

Drivers used for the RX 9070 were Adrenaline 25.4.1, and for the 5070 FE, Geforce Game Ready v576.15 (hotfix) driver was used.

Benchmarks

For our benchmarks, hwinfo.com provided a commercial license of HWiNFO, and UL Solutions provided us with Professional (commercial use) licenses for 3DMark, VRMark, and Procyon.

We start our gaming performance testing using 3DMark synthetic benchmarks to give a rough idea of how the cards stack up against each other. In these results, we have also added the scores for the $1999+ GeForce RTX 5090 and the $250+ Intel Arc B580 since they are the highest-end and lowest-end GPUs of this current generation.

On 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra, which measures DirectX 11 performance at 4K, the 9070 is nearly neck and neck with the RTX 5070, both scoring in the 14-15 thousand points zone.

On Time Spy Extreme, which is a DirectX 12-based 4K benchmark, the RX 9070 wins by nearly 20% vs the RTX 5070. Thus it looks like the new RDNA 4 card boasts DX12-specific optimizations and it also seems that Fire Strike, even at 4K, is perhaps CPU bottlenecked despite us using a fairly powerful processor.

Up next we have Steel Nomad which is also based on DirectX 12 but is more intense than Time Spy Extreme as it aims to measure modern rasterization workload performance. Here the Radeon RX 9070 is nearly 12% ahead of the 5070.

So in modern rasterization, it looks like AMD's 9070 series has made strides, at least in the case of synthetic testing. We will see later if this holds for real-world gaming scenarios too.

Next we then move on to ray tracing performance testing using 3Dmark's Speed Way. In this situation too, the new AMD RX 9070 is essentially tied with the RTX 5070.

Our Cooler Master NR200P Max test system with the Sapphire RX 9070.

With that, we wrap up our synthetic testing and move on to real games. The RX 9070 is advertised as being built for 4K gaming at a 1440p price, however we chose the more realistic 2560x1440 as our resolution for the tests given and also since this is a mid-range card that will mostly appeal to 1440p gamers.

We start with 2016's Deus Ex Mankind Divided powered by the Dawn Engine. The Radeon 9070 and 5070 are essentially trading blows here in terms of both average and minimum framerates.

The Dawn Engine makes an appearance again later, so we shall see if things have changed with newer games.

Following that, we have another 2016 title in the form of Final Fantasy XV based on Luminous Engine. The title, even with Nvidia's GameWorks features disabled, sees the RTX 5070 easily beat the RX 9070. Even the more powerful XT is no match for the NVIDIA offering.

Up next, in 2018's Assassin's Creed Odyssey running on AnvilNext 2.0, the RX 9070 is 11.2% faster than the Nvidia 5070. This is the first win for the 9070 over the GeForce.

The RTX 5070's performance is quite disappointing here as it is barely faster than the 4070. In fact, the minimums were actually better on the latter.

In 2018's Shadow of the Tomb Raider, based on the Foundation Engine, the 9070 and 5070 are essentially tied. And it's not just the averages, even the percentile lows are very close.

We tested our only Vulkan API title with 2019's World War Z, that's based on the Swarm Engine. It has to be said that Nvidia completely outdid AMD here as the 5070 beat the 9070 by nearly 15% and the new GeForce card also bettered the 4070 by close to 35%. So this is a good gen-on-gen improvement for the 5070.

We wanted to test ray-tracing performance too and 2020's Cyberpunk 2077 was our game of choice for that. We also enabled upscaling in this title. We stuck to FSR on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs since we wanted to make it an apples-to-apples comparison.

In our non-path-traced scenario, the RTX 5070 was better than the RTX 9070 by about 7.5% as the latter managed an average of 89.4 fps.

AMD also touted its path tracing enhancements on RDNA 4, so we have taken a look at it too.

As you can see in the image above, AMD has made quite an extraordinary jump in ray-traced Cyberpunk 2077 that runs on the Red engine. The 9070, although not quite as good as the 5070 here, however, it does easily manage to trump the last gen GeForce 4070. Meanwhile, the RX 7800 XT is not even in the same league.

The company explained in detail during its presentation about the ray traversal and shading upgrades RDNA 4 brings. You can learn about it here in our dedicated piece.

So, while AMD has clearly improved by a lot, Nvidia is still ahead in situations of path tracing or very intense ray tracing.

We also looked at another ray-traced test in the form of Bright Memory Infinite. This title is built on Unreal Engine 4 and does not feature as heavy a ray tracing as Cyberpunk, making it representative of slightly lighter ray-traced situations.

The RTX 5070 slots right in between the 9070 XT and non-XT in the test with 54 fps on average.

Released in 2021 and based on the Glacier 2 engine, Hitman 3 sees a huge divide between the AMD and Nvidia cards. The RX 9070 is almost twice as fast as the RTX 5070 in the title. Even the 7800 XT is much better than the new GeForce GPU.

We find that in 2021's Far Cry 6, built on the Dunia Engine, the AMD 9070 was faster than Nvidia's 5070, although not by a huge margin. An interesting thing to note here is that the 9070's minimum framerate was higher than XT's and we wonder if Far Cry's single-threaded nature has to do anything with it.

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy saw the 5070 and 9070 almost neck and neck once more in a Dawn engine title, at least when it comes to averages. So it looks like this engine in particular does not favor Radeon GPUs all that much. Once again, similar to Far Cry, we see another instance of lower minimums on the 9070 XT.

In The Callisto Protocol, which is another Unreal Engine-based game, the RTX 5070 puts on a very impressive show vs the RTX 9070 which only manages to tie with 4070. Even the more powerful 9070 XT is not able to match the 5070.

Speaking of Unreal Engine (UE), Black Myth Wukong is up next and it is another game built on the engine but this time it is UE 5. The heavy "cinematic" setting even with FSR frame generation and 75 super-resolution is enough to overwhelm the RX 7800 XT.

The RX 9070 gets somewhat close to the 5070 but the latter is still a significant ~16.67% ahead.

Finally, we have Call of Duty Black Ops 6 as the last entry for our game testing. Built on the IW 9.0 engine, this game runs exceptionally well on Radeon hardware and the 9070 series is no different.

The Radeon RX 9070 is close to 18% better than the RTX 5070 in averages. The minimums are even better with bigger margins.

VRAM usage

So far, overall, the RTX 5070 and RX 9070 are the ones that have been exchanging blows, with the former being ahead in ray tracing situations while the latter either winning or tying in rasterization cases. In the next section, we look at VRAM usage, performance-per-watt, and performance-per-dollar.

We now highlight the VRAM usages of the cards. Keep in mind, these are the actual used VRAM amounts, not the allocated amounts. To make sense of the data, we have a look at the percentage of total available VRAM capacity used, since the 4070 and 5070 are both equipped with 12GB, while the 9070, 9070 XT and 7800 XT all pack 16GB.

As you can see above, having 16 Gigs of memory helps but we were still a bit disappointed to see that the 9070 (XT) ate up around the same amount of memory as the 7800 XT. While this is not a need for worry, we expected to see some improvement in this area since AMD promises better BVH compression with RDNA 4.

However, that is no reason to worry as there is plenty of buffer on the 9070. That may not be said about the 5070 though.

Power Efficiency

Next, we check out power efficiency measured using average FPS output per watt. The new AMD 9070 Sapphire Pulse model we reviewed consumed 220 watts, or very close to that across all games. That is also the TBP (total board power) spec of the RX 9070.

The RX 9070 and RTX 5070 trade blows in terms of performance-per-watt. While Nvidia is generally ahead in most situations, there are several other instances where it completely flips.

We also ran HWiNFO64 and observed the following Hot Spot core temps (Max) for each card:

• RTX 4070: 91 C
• RX 7800 XT: 92 C
• RX 9070: 74 C (Max memory temp.: 84 C)
• RX 9070 XT: 85 C (Max memory temp.: 92 C)

You will notice that we have not included the hotspot temp for the 5070 and that is because Nvidia has removed that sensor on its 50-series cards.

So it looks like the Sapphire Pulse model we received is doing a fantastic job at cooling this thing down, in spite of being in the very small Cooler Master NR200P Max. Let us also add here that the fan speed under load was hovering around 1700-2000 RPM, and it was not loud at all.

Value for Money

We finally come to the value-for-money category that we measure by average performance per dollar. For the comparison we take the launch MSRP values to gauge how well the value of the cards stack up against one another and how much better or worse the new GPU is compared to last gen.

Value-wise, the Radeon RX 9070 is decent as it is seen offering quite close to the same value as the RX 9070 XT. However, it is generally expected of the cheaper GPU to do more in terms of enticing the customer. Hence we do wish the price point was slightly lower than the $549 SEP meant to match the Nvidia 5070.

Speaking of the 5070, the two GPUs are again seen throwing punches with either taking some big wins from time to time, with perhaps a slight advantage in favor of the RX 9070.

Conclusion

The concluding remarks for the RX 9070 are going to be quite a bit different than what we had said with the 9070 XT. And that is because we praised the XT for the huge improvement we saw in ray tracing as well as the great (promised) value it was offering.

On the other hand, with the 9070, we feel the most impressive thing for the SKU is its efficiency. The card was able to trade blows with Nvidia's 5070 and that is a commendable achievement considering Team Green was quite a bit ahead of Team Red during the RX 7000 series vs the RTX 4000 series showdown.

Unfortunately for AMD, we are not quite as impressed with 9070 in terms of value. As we pointed out above, we do wish AMD had put a lower SEP on this thing. A $499 SEP, in our opinion, would be an instant recommendation. Regardless, it is still a very good card for its asking price.

Although the 5070's MSRP at $549 makes it a slightly more attractive prospect, it only applies to one SKU, the Founders Edition (which is actually readily available in many countries as of writing). This cannot be said of the 9070, which is selling well above MSRP except for two SKUs, (ASRock Challenger, and Gigabyte GAMING). Unsurprisingly, both are out of stock.

So what can we conclude from this? Well, the 9070 is definitely future-proof in regards to 16GB vs 12GB VRAM you will find on the equally priced NVIDIA card, that translates into AMD offering great raster performance, along with decent RT performance; we certainly can't fault the strides they've made gen-on-gen as we said in our 9070 XT review.

If your budget is tight and you can't afford a 9070 XT, then as we suggested in our title, the 9070 is the next best thing as it is just good enough.

Purchase links: RX 9070 / XT (Amazon US)

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