Details on AMD’s $549 and $599 Radeon RX 9070 GPUs, which aim at Nvidia and 4K

AMD is releasing the first detailed specifications of its next-generation Radeon RX 9070 series GPUs and the RDNA4 graphics architecture today, almost two months after teasing them at CES.

The short version is that these are both upper-midrange graphics cards targeting resolutions of 1440p and 4K and meant to compete mainly with Nvidia's incoming and outgoing 4070- and 5070-series GeForce GPUs, including the RTX 4070, RTX 5070, RTX 4070 Ti and Ti Super, and the RTX 5070 Ti.

AMD says the RX 9070 will start at $549, the same price as Nvidia's RTX 5070. The slightly faster 9070 XT starts at $599, $150 less than the RTX 5070 Ti. The cards go on sale March 6, a day after Nvidia's RTX 5070.

Neither Nvidia nor Intel has managed to keep its GPUs in stores at their announced starting prices so far, though, so how well AMD's pricing stacks up to Nvidia in the real world may take a few weeks or months to settle out. For its part, AMD says it's confident that it has enough supply to meet demand, but that's as specific as the company's reassurances got.

Specs and speeds: Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT

As is implied by their similar price tags, the 9070 and 9070 XT have more in common than not. Both are based on the same GPU die—the 9070 has 56 of the chip's compute units enabled, while the 9070 XT has 64. Both cards come with 16GB of RAM (4GB more than the 5070, the same amount as the 5070 Ti) on a 256-bit memory bus, and both use two 8-pin power connectors by default, though the 9070 XT can use significantly more power than the 9070 (304 W, compared to 220 W).

AMD says that its partners are free to make Radeon cards with the 12VHPWR or 12V-2x6 power connectors on them, though given the apparently ongoing issues with the connector, we'd expect most Radeon GPUs to stick with the known quantity that is the 8-pin connector.

AMD says that the 9070 series is made using a 4 nm TSMC manufacturing process and that the chips are monolithic rather than being split up into chiplets as some RX 7000-series cards were. AMD's commitment to its memory controller chiplets was always hit or miss with the 7000-series—the high-end cards tended to use them, while the lower-end GPUs were usually monolithic—so it's not clear one way or the other whether this means AMD is giving up on chiplet-based GPUs altogether or if it's just not using them this time around.

AMD places the performance of both 9070 GPUs in between last generation's flagships and the $549 RX 7900 GRE.

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AMD places the performance of both 9070 GPUs in between last generation's flagships and the $549 RX 7900 GRE. AMD

A overview of RDNA4 architectural improvements.

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A overview of RDNA4 architectural improvements. AMD

AMD places the performance of both 9070 GPUs in between last generation's flagships and the $549 RX 7900 GRE. AMD

A overview of RDNA4 architectural improvements. AMD

AMD's FSR4 promises major upscaling improvements, but it requires one of the new RDNA4 GPUs.

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AMD's FSR4 promises major upscaling improvements, but it requires one of the new RDNA4 GPUs. AMD

Video encoding has also improved, a nice addition for streamers.

AMD

Video encoding has also improved, a nice addition for streamers. AMD

AMD's FSR4 promises major upscaling improvements, but it requires one of the new RDNA4 GPUs. AMD

Video encoding has also improved, a nice addition for streamers. AMD

Among the improvements AMD has made to the RDNA4 architecture are upgrades to the GPUs' ray-tracing hardware. AMD has supported hardware-accelerated ray-tracing since the RX 6000 series and RDNA2, but the performance hit that AMD's GPUs have taken with ray-tracing effects turned on has always been much larger than the hit that competing Nvidia and Intel GPUs have taken. It's one of a few factors that have kept us from full-throatedly recommending Radeon GPUs in the past.

We'll see how things shake out in our testing, but the AMD-provided performance numbers suggest that the new GPUs improve slightly more in ray-traced games than they do in non-ray-traced titles. At 4K, AMD says that Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing turned off runs 26 percent faster on the RX 9070 than it does on the old RX 7900 GRE; the same game with ray tracing turned on runs 33 percent faster on the 9070. That doesn't suggest a dramatic night-and-day difference, but it does suggest that ray-tracing performance will be less of a liability for AMD this generation.

AMD's performance numbers.

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AMD's performance numbers. AMD

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AMD's performance numbers. AMD

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These performance numbers also suggest that the 9070 and 9070 XT will land somewhere in between the last-generation RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX in performance, with lower power consumption and (at least in theory) a much lower price—AMD launched those two cards in late 2022 for $899 and $999, respectively. That's an impressive performance uplift for RDNA4, given that the number of compute units in each card is closer to the RX 7800 XT than to any of the 7900-series cards.

AMD also highlighted improvements to the cards' hardware video encoding engine, which has long been a liability for AMD compared to Nvidia and even Intel's integrated GPUs. This is particularly relevant for people streaming games to Twitch or YouTube who don't want to use their CPU to encode the video stream while they're also trying to use that CPU to play a game. AMD says the new media engine improves low-latency H.264 video encoding quality by 25 percent, with smaller improvements for high-efficiency video codecs like H.265 and AV1.

Finally, AMD has followed Nvidia and Intel and created a new, hardware-backed version of its FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling algorithm that requires an RDNA4 GPU. We've written a bit more about FSR 4 in a separate article. Older Radeon cards (and other GPUs) will continue to work with FSR 3.1, and any game that supports FSR 3.1 can automatically support FSR 4 through AMD's driver.