AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT target ‘4K gaming at a 1440p price’

The long wait is over. After kinda-sorta-teasing the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT at CES 2025, AMD is finally pulling back the curtain on its next-generation graphics cards today, ahead of a March 6 launch date. Meet the rival to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50-series.

AMD shuffled Radeon’s branding this generation to mirror Nvidia’s; the Radeon RX 9070 XT will thus compete with the RTX 5070 Ti, while the Radeon RX 9070 takes aim at the 9070.

Normally, I’d infuse this preview with analysis and commentary, but AMD declined to share 9070 pricing with press in a pre-announcement briefing. It’ll be revealed in the company’s Radeon RX 9070 stream this morning. Since pricing is so crucial to the story of the Radeon RX 9070, I’ll skip most deeper analysis below and instead focus simply on sharing the hardware and software information AMD provided press.

Let’s start with an overview of the improvements found in AMD’s new RDNA 4 graphics architecture, before moving onto details about the Radeon RX 9070 series specifically, and what’s coming with FSR 4 and Hypr-RX.

Meet AMD’s RDNA 4

AMD

One thing revealed in AMD’s CES teaser: The Radeon 9000-series is built from the ground up for an AI future.

Until now, AMD mostly used traditional GPU features for its FSR upscaling technology, while Nvidia’s AI-powered DLSS kept advancing both performance and image quality. No more. The Radeon RX 9070’s new RDNA 4 graphics architecture was designed from the ground up to incorporate a heavier AI focus, which works hand-in-hand with AMD’s new FSR 4 technology (more on that later) to bring the heat to Nvidia. You can see the block diagram and high-level performance claims for RDNA 4’s second-gen AI accelerators above.

AMD

AMD also invested heavily in improving Radeon’s ray tracing performance, which has always lagged behind Nvidia (and recently, Intel). The company says RDNA 4’s compute units (the building blocks of Radeon GPUs) deliver twice the ray tracing throughput of the RDNA 3 CUs inside today’s graphics cards. AMD also changed the Radeon RX 9070 XT’s memory subsystem to more efficiently process ray tracing tasks.

That doesn’t necessarily mean Radeon RX 9000-series ray tracing will be twice as fast as the 7000-series — RT performance is more complicated than that — but it should be significantly better than before.

AMD

You can see above how the third-gen ray tracing cores and second-gen AI accelerators fit into RDNA 4’s new compute units. AMD told reporters that RDNA 4’s compute units are 40 percent faster than RDNA 3’s. RDNA 4 also includes an enhanced media engine, promising up to 20 percent higher visual quality for content creators.

Meet the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT

Now that you know about the RDNA 4 architecture, it’s time to see how AMD is putting it to work. AMD says the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT are built for 4K gaming at a 1440p price.

AMD

As per AMD tradition, the Radeon RX 9070 is a slightly cut-down version of the top-end 9070 XT, running at noticeably lower clock speeds (and significantly less power). Both 9070 cards offer 16GB of GDDR6 memory paired with a 256-bit bus, PCIe 5.0 support, standard 8-pin power connectors, HDMI 2.1b, and DisplayPort 2.1a.

Now, let’s peek at performance.

AMD claims the Radeon RX 9070 XT will deliver 51 percent more performance than the flagship Radeon GPU of last last generation, the Radeon 6900 XT. In a briefing with reporters, AMD representatives told the press that the 9070 XT is pretty similar to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4080 in traditional “raster” gaming performance. That should put it roughly on par with the new GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.

The Radeon RX 9070, meanwhile, should be 38 percent faster than the Radeon RX 6800 XT, and 26 percent faster than the uber-popular RTX 3080. AMD told reporters it expects the 9070 to look “really strong” compared to Nvidia’s $550 GeForce RTX 5070, which launches next week.

FSR 4 FTW?

RDNA 4 was built to work hand-in-hand with FSR 4, the first iteration of AMD’s performance-boosting upscaling and frame generation software designed to leverage AI. Previously, almost all FSR tasks ran on traditional GPU hardware.

Doing so lets AMD mirror Nvidia’s DLSS claims: AMD says FSR 4 delivers large performance boosts with image quality that can match or even surpass native visuals (depending on your Quality settings, of course). While the proof lies in how FSR 4 runs in motion, AMD released some screenshots showing its visual quality in specific zoomed-in details…

…as well as some performance results looking at FSR 4 Upscaling and Upscaling + Frame Generation compared to native 4K.

While Nvidia pushed DLSS 4’s Frame Generation feature to insert up to three AI-generated images between traditional frames, AMD’s FSR sticks to inserting a single generated frame between standard frames. It still provides a big boost in visual smoothness.

Better yet, you’ll be able to use FSR 4 in a fairly large number of games right out of the gate. Integrating new features like this usually takes months and months of effort, with only a few key partner titles available at launch to showcase the technology. Not FSR 4.