AMD RX 9070 and 9070 XT now on sale

AMD's take on longtime rival Nvidia is finally on store shelves in Europe. The new AMD Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics cards will be available starting March 6th for a retail price of $549 and $599, respectively. European pricing ranges between €750 and €1,000, depending on the variant.

AMD says both cards offer “4K gaming at a 1440p price,” though it uses some unusual comparisons to prove it. According to it, the 9070 XT is an average of 51 % faster than the four-year-old RX 6900 XT at 4K and highest settings, and 26 % faster than the four-year-old RTX 3090 at the same settings. If you think about it, the comparison to older cards is a good one. Most users don’t change components every year. Waiting and upgrading after two or three generations makes perfect sense.

Testers have already revealed how they compare to the new graphics cards. The RX 9070 is about 17% faster than Nvidia's RTX 5070 at 4K (without ray tracing), which has the same retail price. The RX 9070 XT is just as fast as the RTX 5070 Ti for $150 less.

AMD also says the 9070 XT is 42 % faster at 4K Ultra (and 38 % faster at 1440p Ultra) than AMD's RX 7900 GRE. It's also "barely a bit slower" than the 7900 XTX, AMD's 2022 flagship.

Each card offers 16GB of GDDR6 memory, DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1b inputs, and are PCIe 5.0 cards. They use standard 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

Although the 9070 and 9070 XT have far fewer GPUs than the 7900 GRE, they don't need as many as they are the first cards to be available with RDNA 4, which AMD says offers twice the graphics rasterization performance (raw performance) per GPU than RDNA 2.

AMD says it has also made major strides in ray tracing, almost doubling FP16 machine learning performance from RDNA 3 to 779 TOPS.

If you're not going to use this performance and technology for UI tasks, AMD will put it to use in games with FSR4, which features a new AI upscaling algorithm for super resolution technology that will work exclusively on these RDNA 4 cards.

AMD says it will offer 30 games with FSR4 support at launch, and 75 by the end of the year. The new cards also feature an improved media engine with higher image quality for game recording. They've also upgraded their AFMF frame generation technology to version 2.1, which provides less tearing and stuttering.

Finally, AMD confirmed the arrival of new RX 9060 graphics cards in the second quarter of this year, which will compete with the RTX 5060 cards, which have not yet been officially announced.