AMD Unveils Radeon RX 9070 Series: RDNA 4 Architecture Brings AI-Enhanced Gaming to the Midrange Market

AMD RX 9000 Series Arrives: RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT Launching on March 6

AMD's Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT Hit Shelves on March 6 with RDNA 4 and AI Upscaling Starting with the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT versions, AMD has introduced the Radeon RX 9000 Series. The GPUs are said to serve the gamers' niche and are said to deliver impressive performance at a handsome rate. The RX 9070 is offered at $550, while the RX 9070 XT is priced at $600. The two are made available starting March 6 through partner brands units ASRock, ASUS and Gigabyte. Both graphics cards feature 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM. The RX 9070 includes 56 compute units and a 2.52GHz clock speed. The increases these numbers to 64 compute units and a 2.97GHz clock speed. These GPUs use PCIe 5.0 and support DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1b. The RX 9070 consumes 220 watts, while the RX 9070 XT requires 304 watts. AMD built the on a new RDNA 4 architecture. This makes the GPU more efficient, increases clock speeds and improves memory allocation. The new architecture also doubles the performance of ray tracing and boosts the speed of AI processing. Those upgrades, in turn, enable FSR 4 upscaling that improves the graphics quality in games that support it. places the RX 9070 XT against the RTX 5070 Ti from NVIDIA. The new GPU delivers similar performance yet costs $150 less. The RX 9070 is also 21% faster at 4k when compared to the previous RX 7900 GRE. The RX 9070 XT also realizes a 42% improvement over its predecessor, making gaming at high resolutions easier. AMD has moved on to consumer gaming, integrating into the RX 9000 Series but staying true to its promise of competitive pricing and performance. These GPUs deliver premium ray tracing and upscaling solely for PC gamers. Partner brands have started sending out the RX 9000 Series to retailers ahead of the launch to satiate demand.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 with RDNA 4 architecture announced

AMD today introduced its new RDNA 4 graphics architecture, launching the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 graphics cards as part of the RX 9000 Series. These cards feature 16GB of memory and bring significant upgrades aimed at enhancing gaming and visual performance. The company said the RX 9000 Series delivers "high-quality gaming graphics, including re-vamped raytracing accelerators and powerful AI accelerators for ultra-fast, cutting-edge performance, and breakthrough gaming experiences." Designed for gamers and creators, these cards blend performance, visuals, and value, according to AMD. The RX 9070 Series supports high-resolution gaming with third-generation raytracing technology, enabling realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections for immersive experiences. The company highlighted that the cards maximize hardware use through a suite of AMD features. Additionally, a newly redesigned AMD Radiance Display Engine and Enhanced Media Engine improve display support and elevate recording and streaming quality. Beyond gaming, the RX 9000 Series GPUs feature second-generation AI accelerators with up to 8x INT8 throughput per AI accelerator (for sparse matrices) compared to RDNA 3, enhancing creative applications and generative AI tasks, the company noted. AMD believes these advancements make the cards versatile for modern workloads. The company highlighted that the Radeon RX 9070 delivers over 20% more performance on average at 1440p gaming compared to the RX 7900 GRE, while the RX 9070 XT boosts that to over 40%. Both cards offer 16GB GDDR6 memory, enabling gamers to run demanding titles at max settings now and in the future. The company noted that FSR 4, exclusive to the RX 9000 Series, improves image quality over FSR 3.1 with better temporal stability, detail preservation, and reduced ghosting. Available in over 30 games at launch and 75 later in 2025, it uses a new ML-based algorithm trained on AMD Instinct Accelerators. FSR 4 builds on the AMD FidelityFX API from FSR 3.1, enabling easy upgrades for supported games. It pairs with FSR 3.1 frame generation and Anti-Lag 2 for smooth, responsive gameplay. The FP8 Wave Matrix Multiply Accumulate (WMMA) feature in RDNA 4 ensures high upscaling quality while boosting performance. The RX 9000 Series will be available starting March 6, 2025, from partners including Acer, ASRock, ASUS, Gigabyte, PowerColor, Sapphire, Vastarmor, XFX, and Yeston.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series Graphics Aim for High Speed at a Solid Price

Following up on its CES announcement, AMD dropped some more information about its upcoming Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT RDNA 4 chips -- notably the target pricing of $549 and $599 -- to address 1440p and 4K players, respectively. And they'll be available from its add-in-board partners, such as Acer, Asus, Sapphire, XFX, ASRock, Gigabyte, PowerColor and more, on March 6. AMD says these cards are "built for 4K gaming at a 1440p price," comparable to the recent Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti. We'll see: It seems like the company is counting on its software to do a lot of heavy lifting, though that's not uncommon. Radeon RX 9060 cards are slated for later in the year. We did get more specs about the cards. For upgraders, AMD retains the old-school 8-pin power connection. As previously revealed, this RDNA 4 generation has been reworked and optimized over the previous architecture, streamlining the core rendering compute units to improve efficiency for both the chip and the on-board memory. The CUs come with improved third-gen ray tracing accelerators, which the company claims delivers twice the throughput over RDNA 3.x. AMD also improved its media engine to address complaints by streamers trying to play and stream on one system. The chips also include upgraded AI accelerators, which can handle more data types for theoretically much better feature (like denoise in Lightroom) and generative AI performance. It also has better memory handling and includes updates to its ONNX libraries -- up to 8x better, the company claims. Plus, the cards AI improvements are ready for neural rendering. Along with the cards, AMD is introducing the newest generation of its upscaling technology, FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 -- the one that requires support incorporated by the game developers -- Fluid Motion Frames 2.1. It can work in conjunction with the company's driver-based HYPR-RX one-click performance optimization. AMD says FSR 4 delivers better results upscaling than native 4K, not just in performance, but in quality. Since the cards are midrange, based on AMD's numbers, you'll really need to use the various software solutions if you want playable 4K; it's unclear if they'll need the same boost for 1440p. The new cards are faster than the last generation, but a 168% increase in F1 24 1440p Ultra with ray tracing doesn't mean much if you don't know the unboosted frame rates (what if the last gen only hit 10fps?). Testing will tell.

AMD Announces Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 with ridiculously low pricing

AMD has officially unveiled the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070, its latest entries into the Radeon RX 9000 series, built on the RDNA 4 architecture. Designed to offer a balance of performance, efficiency, and new software-driven features, these GPUs aim to cater to both high-end gamers and enthusiasts looking for cost-effective upgrades. While there's no word on when the reviews are going live, here's an in-depth look at everything AMD has pckaed into the new Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs including performance metrics, architectural improvements, and the software ecosystem supporting these new GPUs. The Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 are built on the RDNA 4 architecture, which introduces several improvements over its predecessor. One of the key advancements in RDNA 4 is the introduction of enhanced compute units, which feature dynamic register allocation. This allows for more efficient resource utilisation, leading to better performance in workloads that require parallel processing. Additionally, RDNA 4 brings increased AI and machine learning capabilities, with support for FP8 and BF8 precision calculations. This improvement allows for more efficient execution of AI-related tasks, offering double the performance in specific workloads compared to the previous RDNA 3 architecture. Memory management has also been improved in RDNA 4, with optimisations in memory bandwidth usage. These enhancements ensure that data can be processed and transferred more quickly, reducing latency and improving the overall gaming and computing experience. While AMD has not disclosed all specifications in full detail, some key performance metrics were shared during the announcement. The Radeon RX 9070 XT is positioned as the higher-end model within the series. It features a greater number of compute units and operates at higher clock speeds, making it well-suited for demanding gaming and professional workloads. The Radeon RX 9070, on the other hand, is a slightly cut-down version of the RX 9070 XT. It offers fewer compute units and operates at slightly lower clock speeds, but still claims to provide a strong gaming experience. This model is expected to be a more affordable alternative for users who want high performance without the premium price tag. Both GPUs benefit from improved ray tracing capabilities, which enhance lighting, shadows, and reflections in supported games. The improvements in ray tracing performance make these cards more competitive against alternatives in the market. In performance benchmarks provided by AMD, the Radeon RX 9070 XT demonstrated an average increase of 20-30% in rasterisation performance compared to its RDNA 3 counterpart. Additionally, the RDNA 4 architecture contributes to better energy efficiency, meaning that users can expect improved performance without significantly increasing power consumption. AMD has yet to confirm final pricing, but the RX 9070 XT is expected to be positioned as a high-end but cost-effective alternative to competing GPUs, while the RX 9070 will likely target the mid-range segment. The two cards have officially been announced at an event in China with the Radeon RX 9070 XT series starting off at 4999 RMB, and RX 9070 cards retailing at 4499 RMB. Considering the positioning of the cards against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070, the AMD cards will be significantly cheaper. The NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti is officially priced at 6299 RMB and the RTX 5070 is yet to get an official China price. In the US, the two NVIDIA cards are priced at USD 749 and USD 549. Not much information is available regarding the price for the RTX 5070 but given that the AMD RX 9070 will be competing with the RTX 5070, we can only assume that it's either the same or lesser. In India, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is officially priced at INR 82,000 and the RTX 5070 is priced at INR 60,000. By reducing the same by about 20 per cent, we get an estimated price of INR 65,000 for the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and the RX 9070 could be priced at INR 60,000 or lesser. We will update the figure when we receive word about the official Indian pricing. While there's no word on the existence of an NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti, if AMD's pricing is indeed lucrative, then NVIDIA will have to move very quickly to release a competitive card that's not only offering great performance (we mean Raster performance and not AI performance) at a decent price. With all the issues around low-stocks, exorbitant pricing and missing ROPs, NVIDIA's having quite the launch and this year could end up in AMD's favour as far as GPUs are concerned. With the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070, it seems like AMD aims to provide a compelling option for gamers looking for performance improvements at competitive price points. The combination of RDNA 4 advancements, FSR 4 upscaling, and HYPR-RX software enhancements indicates a strong push towards improving both raw performance and gaming experience.

Look Out, RTX 5070: AMD Radeon RX 9070 Graphics Cards Get Detailed, Priced

For as long as I can remember, I've had love of all things tech, spurred on, in part, by a love of gaming. I began working on computers owned by immediate family members and relatives when I was around 10 years old. I've always sought to learn as much as possible about anything PC, leading to a well-rounded grasp on all things tech today. In my role at PCMag, I greatly enjoy the opportunity to share what I know. Following a teaser at CES 2025, AMD has at last fully revealed its next-generation Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT, calling to mind the once-famous ATI Radeon 9000-series graphics card branding. These new cards, priced at $549 and $599, respectively, lead the charge on AMD's latest strategy to compete in the midrange graphics card market. With claims of improved ray-tracing performance over the previous generation, as well as enhanced super-scaling and frame generation via FSR 4, these new cards show potential. Here's a look over AMD's new RDNA 4 graphics architecture and the first graphics cards in the Radeon RX 9000 lineup. AMD Radeon RX 9000: Recalling a Golden Era in GPUs AMD cleverly named its new graphics cards the Radeon RX 9000 series, paralleling an early family of ATI cards known as the Radeon 9000 series. These graphics cards landed way back in 2002 and marked a golden era for ATI, the creator and manufacturer of the Radeon series, before AMD acquired the company in 2006. Back then, the original Radeon 9000 series dominated the graphics card market against Nvidia's GeForce 4 series and GeForce FX 5000 cards that replaced them. This time around, the Radeon RX 9000 series won't try to stand up to Nvidia's top-end cards, as AMD has yielded the high end to the enormous Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090. Instead, AMD aims to conquer the space between the ultra-high-end GeForce RTX 5090 and the budget market. (The latter is typically dominated by last-generation graphics cards nowadays.) RDNA 4 Improves Ray Tracing AMD's new graphics architecture, RDNA 4, powers the Radeon RX 9000 series. It's an evolution of the RDNA 3 architecture that anchored the Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards. The key focus of this new architecture, according to AMD, is on improving ray-tracing performance, so most of AMD's changes were made to the ray-tracing hardware. The new RDNA 4 ray accelerators have eight Ray/Box units and two Ray/Triangle units each, a twofold increase over the ray accelerators in RDNA 3. These processing units carry out the ray-tracing work and help determine which items in a scene the ray accelerators need to work on. AMD also added dedicated hardware for instance-transform functions and reduced the latency associated with what it refers to as "bounding volume box hierarchy" (BVH8) traversal operations. This will increase the number of in-scene objects that the ray-tracing units can analyze and prioritize at once, which should improve ray-accelerator performance. Another feature change, which AMD refers to as "oriented bounding boxes," further helps ray accelerator performance by reducing false-positive intersections. When determining what is touched by a light source, BVH bounding boxes that are traditionally axis-aligned are used. This creates blocky, stair-step patches that are processed by the ray accelerators; these would include areas of empty space, essentially wasting some of the hardware's time. With oriented bounding boxes, this issue is significantly reduced, resulting in up to a 10% improvement in traversal performance. AMD also says it is improving its memory system architecture with RDNA 4. The queues for memory requests by resources were extended to allow more data to be in motion at once. AMD also shifted to an out-of-order access design, whereas RDNA 3 took memory requests strictly in order, creating delays and work stalls when a piece of data loaded slowly. This new approach overcomes that limitation by enabling other memory requests to be fulfilled while others are loading. This change will help memory-bandwidth usage throughout the GPU, but AMD says this should have a more pronounced impact on ray-tracing workloads. FSR 4 Leverages More AI for Graphics Rendering AI performance has been a massively hot topic in the graphics card industry, so AMD introduced more AI throughput boosts in its RDNA 4 architecture. For one, AMD improved wave matrix multiply-accumulate (WMMA) performance and efficiency, and it has added support for new 8-bit floating point operations to equip its AI accelerators for new workloads and models. WMMA operations are processing instructions that AMD created to enable its GPU cores to process mathematical tensors in higher-precision formats. This unlocks more advanced AI operations and graphical features, with greater energy efficiency than standard shading hardware. The applications of AI are growing and changing constantly, but AMD's Radeon RX 9000-series GPUs will leverage it to boost resolution-scaling and frame-generation performance in the latest version of its signature FSR graphics-enhancement technology, FSR 4. A key change in FSR 4 is the switch to using ML-powered upscaling, which runs on the AI accelerators inside of AMD Radeon graphics cards. Initially, this feature will only be available on Radeon RX 9000-series cards, but it will later be supported on previous generations of AMD graphics cards like the Radeon RX 7000 series. FSR 4 is similar to Nvidia's new DLSS 4 technology and aims to do much the same thing. FSR 3 and FSR 3.1 used resolution super-scaling, which renders frames at a lower resolution and uses supporting processing units to artificially reproduce the scene at a sharper resolution. Like DLSS, FSR 3 also introduced frame generation to its mix, which uses supporting processing units to artificially generate a new frame and stitch it between two raw-rendered frames, thus increasing effective frame rates. The fourth generation of FSR picks up where FSR 3 left off, working to generate even more artificial frames between each originally rendered frame to drive even higher frame rates, though this still comes with trade-offs in terms of image quality and latency. The new ML-powered FSR 4 will also reportedly help to sharpen image quality compared with FSR 3 and FSR 3.1, but we'll have to see how that works out in practice. Adding generated frames between rendered ones can lead to more perceived latency relative to the frame rate, however. To help with this greater latency, AMD is also introducing Anti-Lag 2, an updated variant of an existing AMD technology, a latency-reduction tech that might be key to enjoying high-speed gameplay under FSR 4. At launch, AMD says it will have more than 30 FSR 4 titles ready, and that list is expected to grow to include more than 75 titles in 2025. Detailing the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT AMD's first two cards in the Radeon RX 9000 series, the Radeon RX 9070 and the faster Radeon RX 9070 XT, use the same graphics chip, with a die area of 357mm2 that consists of 53.9 billion transistors. This makes the GPU die roughly similar to Nvidia's GB203 GPU die that powers the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080. (It covers 378mm2 and contains 45.6 billion transistors.) Both fabricate the chips using similar TSMC manufacturing processes, too, with the Nvidia GB203 created on TSMC's 4N process and the new RX 9070 GPUs created on its N4P process node. In total, AMD's new GPU die has 64 compute units with 64 shaders each, adding up to a total of 4,096. These are accompanied by 256 texture mapping units (TMUs), 128 raster operation processors (ROPs), 128 AI accelerators, and 64 ray accelerators. All of these resources are active and available on the Radeon RX 9070 XT, but eight of the 64 compute units are disabled on the Radeon RX 9070, reducing its core counts to 3,584 shaders, 224 TMUs, 112 AI accelerators, and 56 ray accelerators. The number of ROPs does not change from the Radeon RX 9070 XT to the RX 9070. AMD also added 64MB of its Infinity Cache, which it has previously said drives up to 3.25 times the bandwidth of 256-bit 16Gbps GDDR6, increasing memory resources within the same memory interface. Both graphics cards work on this enhanced 256-bit-wide memory interface, connecting to 16GB of 20Gbps GDDR6 video memory. Other than the difference in core counts, the most significant differences between the two cards come from clock speeds and power draw. The Radeon RX 9070 XT will be clocked at 2.97GHz and require 304 watts of power, while the RX 9070 will be clocked at 2.52GHz and require 220W. The RX 9070 cards will be available via AMD's usual slate of board partners, including Acer, ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte, PowerColor, Sapphire, and XFX. Most cards will employ the usual 8-pin power connectors, and all should support DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1b ports to power the latest high-refresh-rate gaming monitors. Performance and Pricing for Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT: Launching March 6 Due to the new architectural changes, projecting the latest Radeon RX 9000-series cards' performance is difficult at this time. AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT clearly has fewer hardware resources than the older AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, but this doesn't necessarily indicate it will be slower. AMD says that, in ray-tracing workloads, the Radeon RX 9070 XT should be about 10% faster than the RX 7900 XTX, but we will need to test this in the lab before we can say for sure. The fact that improving ray tracing performance was a key focus for AMD in developing the new RDNA 4 architecture is promising, as that was the weakest link in the RDNA 3 architecture. However, less seems to have been done to the shaders, and AMD says that in games that don't support ray tracing, we may see the older Radeon RX 7900 XTX hold the upper hand over the RX 9070. That, coupled with Nvidia's comparable cards (read: the GeForce RTX 5070) close on the horizon and prices in flux as AMD's new cards hit the market, will make for murky waters for customers buying their next GPU. Though we don't know exactly how well these cards will perform quite yet, if AMD is able to ship enough of these new graphics cards at MSRP, or close to it, it may steal some of the GeForce RTX 50-series spotlight from Nvidia. Its prices put the Radeon RX 9070 XT and the Radeon RX 9070 in direct competition with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070. Nvidia has struggled to ship enough of its new RTX 50-series graphics cards to meet demand so far, with the already-released models constantly out of stock and selling for inflated prices. If AMD can avoid supply shortages of its own, and 9070 prices stay in check, it could get an upper hand in this middle part of the graphics card market while Nvidia works to improve its supply issues.

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

Watch out, Nvidia? AMD reveals its Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT graphics cards, and a new FSR 4 feature built to rival DLSS. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. FSR 4 builds atop AMD's existing FSR 3.1 framework, which allows developers to very quickly integrate the new technology. (Nvidia's DLSS 4 was similarly designed.) That means not one, not two, but 30+ games will support FSR 4 right at launch, with the number of supported games expected to grow to 75+ by the end of the year. That's one of the biggest, fastest technology adoptions in history. And there are some heavy hitters in there, too. AMD makes the chip powering the PlayStation 5, and several Sony games crack FSR 4's debut lineup, including God of War: Ragnarok, The Last of Us Part I, Horizon: Forbidden West, and the Spider-Man series. Beyond that, blockbusters like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6/Warzone, Marvel Rivals, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine II, and Kingdom Come Deliverance II make the cut. FSR 4 is exclusive to RDNA 4-based graphics cards, starting with these Radeon RX 9070 offerings; older GPUs will need to use FSR 2 or 3 instead, which are supported over 400 games. AMD is also introducing a new update for its driver-based frame generation technology, AMD Fluid Motion Frames, which can add frame gen to virtually any game. AFMF version 2.1 offers "improved frame generation image quality with reduced ghosting and better temporal tracking" on Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs or later. AFMF is part of AMD's Hypr-RX suite of features. Hypr-RX combines and activates several Radeon features in one fell swoop, including driver-based frame generation and upscaling, Radeon Anti-Lag, and Radeon Boost. In unison, these technologies can drastically raise frame rates while lowering latency for ultra-fast performance. Image quality can sometimes degrade a bit using driver-based upscaling, especially around UI elements, but Hypr-RX can deliver stunning speed improvements in thousands of games. AMD seems to be positioning it against Nvidia's much-improved DLSS 4 technology with Multiple Frame Generation; MFG looks better, but Hypr-RX works on thousands of games and several generations of Radeon graphics cards. My take? I'm glad they're both around. Each is excellent in its own way. So there you have it: The Radeon RX 9070 series, the RDNA 4 technology behind it, and the FSR 4 features the hardware helps enable. Will AMD's next-gen GPU manage to upset Nvidia? Lots of PC gamers are pretty irritated about the RTX 50-series' sky-high prices and lackluster performance gains, so AMD definitely has an opening here -- but it needs to nail both performance and value to seize the advantage. The Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT launch March 6, so we'll know where the chips fall sooner than later.

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Finally Launches March 6 - IGN

AMD has finally released more information about its upcoming graphics cards, the Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070. Both the Radeon RX 9070 XT and the Radeon RX 9070 launch on March 6. The Radeon RX 9070 XT was unveiled at CES 2025, the same time as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, though Team Red was a bit more cautious about revealing detailed information about its next-generation GPU. Now, though, AMD has released everything there is to know about these new GPUs. Both of the new AMD graphics cards are built on the new RDNA 4 graphics architecture, which improves performance across the board, but the biggest uplift is in ML, or Machine Learning performance. This is largely thanks to new AI Accelerator units that are much more powerful than their counterparts in RDNA 3 GPUs like the previous-generation Radeon RX 7900 XT. These new AI cores are also the driving force behind FSR 4, which finally brings AI upscaling to Radeon graphics cards. Just like DLSS, FSR 4 - short for FidelityFX Super Resolution - uses a machine learning algorithm to accurately upscale lower resolution images to your native resolution. Though, keep in mind that accuracy is the name of the game here. Because while FSR 4 is going to be much faster than rendering a game at your native resolution, any machine learning solution will have a bigger performance impact than something like FSR 3.1. We don't know how much performance will be impacted, but don't expect it to be faster than the more traditional upscaling in FSR 3. While both graphics cards pack 16GB of GDDR6 memory, the Radeon RX 9070 XT is significantly more powerful, packing in 14% more compute units than the regular RX 9070. Combined with a higher power budget, the 9070 XT is going to be a much better fit for 4K gaming, where the 9070 will fit comfortably at 1440p. We went ahead and listed the specs below: . Luckily, you won't have to wait long to get your hands on one of these graphics cards. Both the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and the Radeon RX 9070 launch on March 6, starting at $599 and $549, respectively. However, because AMD is not launching a reference design, like it did with its last generation of graphics cards, you can expect prices to fluctuate drastically at launch. However, give it a couple weeks and it should calm down a bit.

AMD's RX 9000 series reveal left me with even more questions

After a long wait, the future of AMD's best graphics cards is finally here. The company just announced the RX 9000 series, comprised of two new GPUs: The RX 9070 XT and the RX 9070. Both are set to launch on March 6. While the GPUs sound thrilling, I'm left with several questions even though AMD truly filled in the gaps on RDNA 4. AMD initially teased RDNA 4, or RX 9000 series, during CES 2025. However, it took nearly two months for more concrete information to arrive, and today, it's all finally here. Recommended Videos AMD's focus throughout the presentation was the fact that gamers buy mainstream GPUs more often than behemoths along the lines of the RTX 5090. To that end, AMD cited its own research, saying that 85% of gamers buy GPUs that cost less than $700. At the same time, higher resolutions are slowly becoming mainstream, with more and more people buying 1440p and 4K monitors. The needs of gamers have gone up, now including solid performance in ray tracing, but keeping it affordable is important too. Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming ReSpec Subscribe Check your inbox! Privacy Policy That's where my first question comes in: How much these GPUs will cost. AMD didn't reveal that key piece of information during the press briefing, but it'll come up during the event, at which point we'll update this article. Until we know the price, it's hard to speculate about where RDNA 4 will land among competing cards, but at least we have a lot of specs and some benchmarks to go over here. The specs of RDNA 4 have been leaked months ago, and it turns out that leakers got a lot of it right. The flagship RX 9070 XT serves up 64 compute units (CUs), 64 hardware ray tracing (HW RT) accelerators, and 128 AI accelerators. The boost clock nearly hits 3GHz, maxing out at 2.97GHz, which means that overclocked GPUs will definitely go past that threshold. The card comes with 16GB of VRAM across a 256-bit bus, and this memory configuration also applies to the RX 9070 non-XT. The flagship has a total board power (TBP) of 304 watts. The RX 9070 cuts back on every spec, scaling down to 56 CUs and a maximum clock speed of 2.52GHz. On the other hand, the power consumption is also significantly lower, now at 220 watts. Both GPUs will use GDDR6 memory. AMD chose to stick to GDDR6, clocked at 20Gbps, which it found to offer the best balance of performance and cost. Nvidia's RTX 50-series already made the switch to GDDR7, having used GDDR6X in the previous generation, but AMD offsets for the loss of bandwidth by adding plenty of VRAM to its GPUs. AMD revealed some benchmarks for both GPUs, and they seem pretty great. However, when comparing to Nvidia, it used an RTX 3090 as opposed to something from a current generation. AMD explained that this was because people who bought the RTX 30-series will be looking to upgrade now, but it would've been nice to see some scores for that. Regardless, the RX 9070 is said to offer up to 21% faster performance than the RX 7900 GRE at 4K, which is a sizeable uplift. Meanwhile, the RX 9070 XT will be up to 42% faster at 4K, while also showing solid ray tracing improvements. With the new compute unit (CU) in RDNA 4, AMD was able to boost efficiency, clock speeds, and register allocation. The new graphics cards will come equipped with third-gen ray tracing accelerators, which will offer 2x ray tracing throughput per CU. Historically, AMD trailed behind Nvidia in ray tracing, but it's certainly making improvements in that regard. The new GPUs will also come with second-gen AI accelerators, which AMD promises will result in up to 8x faster AI performance when compared to RDNA 3. The die size is at about 350mm2, and the transistor count at around 44 billion. AMD also revealed that the GPU was built on a 4nm process. The RX 9000 series makes the switch to PCIe 5.0, and it also offers DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1b support. The company will not be making its own versions of the cards, also known as MBA (Made By AMD), but it says it'll work closely with its partners to ensure availability, and more importantly, availability at MSRP. Alongside the RX 9000 series, AMD also announced FSR 4, which will remain an RDNA 4-exclusive for the time being.

AMD Unleashes the Radeon RX 9070 GPUs

AMD's Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT offer more frames with FSR 4, but will it compete on price? AMD’s newly revealed Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT mid-range GPUS are set to compete against the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti, respectively. At least, we won’t have to wait long before we see how well these new cards stack up, as the cards are set to launch on March 6 through a range of OEMs. Skipping any mention of a RX 8000 series (to better align with the GPU nomenclature with the latest Ryzen 9 series CPUs) doesn’t mean it's fully two generations ahead, though it is built with 4K and 1440p gaming in mind for more recent games. The lower-level GPU, the RX 9070, comes in at 56 of the company’s RDNA 4 compute units with 16 GB of VRAM (GDDR6 running at 20 Gbps) on a 256-bit memory bus and a boost clock of 2.54 GHz. The RX 9070 XT stands taller with 64 compute units, more AI accelerators, and a 2.97 Ghz boost clock. The higher-end GPU also maintains 16 GB VRAM, equivalent to Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti. The RX 9070 has 53.9 billion transistors versus 55.8 billion on the RX 7900 XT. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was more than ready to proclaim, "Moore's law is dead,†but there's still somehting interesting going on considering the 7900 XT contained 84 RDNA 3 compute units at launch in 2022. Each RDNA 4 CU is supposed to support higher clock speeds than RDNA 3. AMD also claims its new GPUs are more power efficient than the past or current generation, meaning it should be able to get more done than the RX 79000 series with less total compute units. The RX 9070 demands 220 W of board power compared to 250 W on the RTX 5070. Meanwhile, the RX 9070 XT has 304 W of total board power compared to 300 W on the RTX 5070 Ti. However, the RX 9070 will still recommend a 650 W PSU, while the 9070 XT will ask for a 750 W power supply, same as the equivalent Nvidia cards. RDNA 4 sports a new structure with an extra computing unit designed with ray tracing in mind. According to AMD, the compute unit is 40% faster than RDNA 3, and there’s a promised two times increase in ray tracing performances per compute unit versus the past-gen architecture thanks to a reconfigured, more-optimized raytracing pipeline. The new architecture supports PCIe Gen 5 along with HDMI 2.1b and DisplayPort 2.1a. Team Red also promoted its second-gen AI accelerators. The RX 9070 should be able to hit 1,165 peak TOPS of AI performance versus the RX 9070 XT at 1,557 TOPS. Ignoring all the talk about AI, AMD purports more gamers are looking to upgrade off the RX 6800 XT or the Nvidia RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. For gen-on-gen performance, Team Red claims you’ll get 33% better performance in a Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p with ray tracing enabled on the RX 9070 compared to last year’s RX 7900 GRE. The XT will get over 66% better in the same game at 4K ultra-performance versus the RX 7900 GRE. The frames aren’t as significant in a game like F1 24 or Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, but there’s still a bigger uplift in native gaming performance. AMD waited until its full announcement to drop its final pricing on the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. We’ll update this story once we get official word for how much each card will cost. It’s a tough market, and Nvidia’s latest issues with RTX 50-series availability have made customers nervous about the cost of upgrading. AMD said it was working with the companies making its AIBs to have enough stock at launch, but time will tell. AMD said it doesn’t have to play in the same exclusive, ultra-expensive pool as the big dogs at Nvidia. Instead, it’s focusing on the mid-range GPUs that, perhaps, a few more gamers can afford. That doesn’t mean these cards are cheap. AMD may have focused on running cards for under $700, though Nvidia still holds an edge in gaming software. The company now has to bet more gamers would prefer to save some bucks (and, depending on availability, actually be able to buy one) rather than relying on tricks like multi-frame gen. However, AMD is still promoting how its next generation of FSR provides better framerates than the last generation. AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 for the RDNA 4 architecture is supposed to improve the upscaling tech trying to take on DLSS 4 by reducing regular complaints of ghosting or anti-aliasing artifacts. Just like always, FSR takes a lower-resolution image and upscales it to a higher-resolution image, all while keeping the performance of the lower-end. AMD said FSR-4 can create “near-native results†for its supported games on the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT. Whether that’s true will be up to the eagle-eyed players keen to point out any issue with a non-native frame, especially when you throw frame generation into the mix. AMD compared native 4K to FSR 3.1 and FSR 4, claiming the latter seems closer to native with fine details and far-away images. As for performance, AMD claimed a larger uplift in FPS on a 9070 XT in a game like Warhammer 40K: Space Marine II, going from 53 FPS to 102 FPS at 4K. Increased frames are slightly lower on games like Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. That’s all before frame gen, as well. As for multi-frame gen, that's still off the table. AMD indicated it has worked on prototypes for that AI capability but is mostly there to encourage benchmarking rather than improve the user experience. No matter what card you choose, upscaling is a boon for gamers who can’t spend $2,000 on an RTX 5090. The question will be how it compares to DLSS 4. AMD also has a new AMF 2.1 model to make generated frames look smoother than before. Nvidia made a big deal about the transformer model of DLSS. AMD’s widening software gulf is nowhere clearer than with 3x or 4x multi-frame gen, a capability exclusive to the RTX 50 series of GPUs. The more frames you generate with AI, the more likely you find odd artifacts (and in our tests, we certainly have). But when comparing mid-range GPUs, those extra frames may be worth the drawbacks to some budget-conscious gamers. AMD said it's supporting more than 30 games with FSR 4 at launch, including recent games like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Kingdom Come Deliverance II. The chipmaker said it planned to have more than 75 games support the technology going into 2025. FSR 4 will be supported on RDNA 4 only, while the company promised more games to support FSR 3.1 throughout the year.

AMD looks to undercut Nvidia with RX 9070-series GPUs

With the launch of AMD's RX 9070-series graphics cards, AMD is going back to its roots. Rather than trying to compete with Nvidia on raw performance with another flagship GPU beyond the means of most gamers, the House of Zen aims to undercut its competitor by delivering more frames per dollar. AMD has employed various versions of this strategy over the years - its core-packed Ryzen processors come to mind - and by focusing on the mid-tier segment, AMD clearly aims to capitalize on growing discontent with Nvidia's sky-high prices this generation. The House of Zen is billing its $549 RX 9070 and $599 9070 XT graphics cards as delivering 4K performance at 1440P pricing. But, while the cards are certainly capable of 4K gaming, especially with AMD's AI upscaling and frame gen tech enabled - more on those in a bit - it's clear these cards are designed primarily with high-refresh rate 1440p gaming in mind. This is reflected in AMD's positioning of the cards, which slot in behind its now two-year-old RX 7900 XT and XTX graphics cards designed for 4K gaming, and ahead of its previous 1440p power house the 7900 GRE. It also makes sense when you consider just how few folks are actually gaming at 4K. According to Steam's latest hardware survey, more than three-quarters of PC gamers are running monitors at 1440p or lower, and just 4 percent are running at 4k or higher. In terms of performance, AMD says the RX 9070 will deliver between 20 and 21 percent higher frame rates on average compared to its prior-gen RX 7900 GRE at 1440p and 4K respectively. The XT variant, meanwhile, promises an average uplift of 38 to 42 percent at those same resolutions. As for how they compare to Nvidia's chips, AMD is going after Nvidia's RTX 5070 and 5070 TI graphics cards. During AMD's launch event, David McAfee, VP and GM of AMD's client business claimed the RX 9070 XT would deliver average performance just 2 percent shy of the 5070 TI. But, as always, we recommend taking vendor supplied benchmarks and claims with a hefty dose of salt. Case in point, as you can see from the chart below, Call of Duty Black Ops 6 and Ghost of Tsushima are doing a lot to lift that average. Underpinning these performance gains is AMD's all-new RDNA 4 graphics architecture. Without getting too deep in the weeds, it boasts an improved memory subsystem, upgraded compute, RT, and AI compute engines, along with higher overall clock speeds. AMD is particularly proud of the architecture's new RT cores, an area where it's historically lagged Nvidia by a pretty wide margin. RDNA 4's Gen 3 RT accelerators promise twice the throughput per compute unit versus RDNA 3, which should help as more games begin to list ray-tracing capabilities on their minimum requirements. As for the actual silicon powering the 9070-series, AMD has ditched the chiplet architecture used by its 7000-series parts in favor of a more traditional monolithic die this time around. The chips are each complemented by 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. The main differentiator between the two is that the non-XT variant has about 13 percent fewer compute, RT, and AI units, and roughly 15 percent lower clock speeds. Along with gaming, AMD didn't miss an opportunity to talk up the cards in the context of the emerging AI PC segment. However, for those excited about running LLMs, image gen, or some other AI-augmented workflow, the 9070 series is a mixed bag. On one hand, the card's second-gen AI accelerators promise significant gains for the kinds of fuzzy math endemic to machine learning workloads. AMD claims up to 1,557 TOPS for the XT and 1,165 for the standard RX 9070. That's sparse INT4 performance, putting it just ahead of Nvidia's recently launched RTX 5070 TI, which boasts 1,406 TOPS. Compared to the 7900 GRE, AMD expects the 9070 XT to deliver a 12-34 percent uplift in performance for content creation-based machine learning tasks in software like Adobe Lightroom and DaVinci Resolve. For GenAI workloads, AMD suggests the gains will be even greater for image generation in Amuse and Procyon. However, as we've previously discussed, AI compute bottlenecks differ from one workload to another. Image generation benchmarks, for instance, are often compute-bound, while large language models (LLM) like Llama 3 tend to be more constrained by memory bandwidth. With a 256-bit memory bus, AMD's 9070-series cards top out at 640 GBps of bandwidth compared to the 7900 XT's 800 GBps and the XTX's 960 GBps. On paper, this means the 9070-series cards should be about 22 to 40 percent slower in memory-bound workloads. If you'd rather spend your time gaming than playing with AI models on your PC, the 9070s' AI compute units won't necessarily be wasted. Just like Nvidia, AMD is leaning hard on AI upscaling techniques to juice performance figures this generation. This technology works by initially rendering games at lower resolutions, say 1080p, and then taking advantage of the AI accelerators to upscale those frames to 4K. Nvidia calls this tech Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), while AMD calls its equivalent FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). With FSR4 enabled, AMD claims the 9070 XT is capable of more than doubling frame rates versus 4K, but again, that's because, with FSR enabled, the graphics cores aren't actually rendering those frames at 4K. Alongside FSR, the cards will also support frame generation, which, rather than using its AI accelerators to upscale lower resolution frames, boosts frame rates by generating intermediate frames. As for pricing, AMD's RX 9070 will hit shelves beginning March 6 with a manufacturer suggested retail price (MSRP) of $549, while the more powerful XT variant has an MSRP of $599. This puts the RX 9070 directly in contention with Nv's similarly priced RTX 5070, while the 9070 XT undercuts the RTX 5070 TI by $150 while claiming to deliver similar performance. However, that assumes you can actually get one at that price. As we've seen with Nvidia's 50-series cards, MSRP doesn't count for much if board partners and retailers don't take the suggestion. Looking on Newegg and BestBuy, we see that multiple 5070 TIs - a part with an MSRP of $749 - listed at closer to $900 or even $1,000. Meanwhile, Nvidia's $2,000 flagship 5090 can be found listed for anywhere from $400 to $1,000 over sticker. But even if you're willing to pay the markup for Nvidia's 50-series cards, your next challenge will be finding one in stock. Thus, the success of AMD's RX 9070 and 9070 XT will likely end up having less to do with how well they stack up against Nvidia in gaming than whether you can actually buy the cards at anything resembling their launch pricing. ®

AMD has officially revealed its RDNA 4-based RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT GPUs and they look a lot like RDNA 3, only turbocharged

AMD has finally taken the wraps off of its long-awaited RDNA 4 graphics cards, the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. And, to be honest, it feels like a long time coming. Details have been thin on the ground after a somewhat chaotic half-reveal during CES 2025, but now we've finally received hard details as to what these cards are made of -- and a closer look at the shiny new architecture inside. Well, sort of shiny and new, at least. It's probably easier to think of RDNA 4 as an evolution of RDNA 3 rather than a quantum leap forward in AMD's GPU architecture, and that's perhaps not a bad thing. AMD has confirmed once more that the launch is set for March 6, and interest in the new cards has reached an appropriate fever pitch. While AMD has been keen to point out that these cards are not designed to compete at the upper end of the market, many have been keeping their collective fingers crossed that AMD might release something competitive in the mid-range that gamers might be able to get hold of for reasonable money. More on that later. Both the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT are built on TSMC's 4nm process node, resulting in a 357 mm² die roughly the same size as the version used in the RX 7800 XT, but with almost double the transistors: 53.9 billion in total. However, even with the massively increased transistor count, there's nothing that looks particularly out of the ordinary in the overall architectural view of the die itself -- but it's when you dive into the details of the Compute Units that things become interesting. RDNA 4's CUs initially look much the same as the RDNA 3 versions, with a few key efficiencies thrown into the pot. However, sitting next to each batch of ALUs and TLUs is now a second generation AI accelerator with support for FP8 calculations and enhanced matrix operations, alongside a faster memory subsystem, improved scalar units and dynamic register allocation, which AMD says all leads to increased efficiency per CU and much higher clock speeds compared to RDNA 3. RDNA 4 also supports the reordering of shader instructions requesting memory, which should keep those new CUs busy. Keep an eye on those AI accelerators. They'll come into play later for the latest version of AMD's upscaler, FSR 4, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to the down and dirty stuff. The CUs are still paired into Dual Compute Units, as per RDNA 3. The RX 9070 XT gets eight per shader engine, with a grand total of 256 ALUs, 32 TLUs, four AI accelerators and 16 KB scalar cache across them, alongside 32 KB of shader instruction cache and 128 KB of shared memory per compute engine. Sitting at the tail end of our pretty little CU stack we get two ray accelerators a piece, and it's the changes here that AMD seems particularly proud of. RDNA 3 cards were not known for their ray tracing performance, and AMD looks to have zeroed in on this deficit to bring a claimed 2x ray traversal performance uplift to RDNA 4. The third generation ray tracing accelerators use "Oriented Bounding Boxes" to reduce the size and complexity of Bounding Volume Hierarchy data, which it says delivers much more efficient ray traversal through geometry with a lower memory cost, making better use of the VRAM in the process. The new RT accelerators now have a second intersection engine, which AMD says doubles the performance for both Ray/Box and Ray/Triangle testing, alongside a dedicated ray transform block, which is also said to increase the performance as rays are traversed. While AMD is still performing the traversal of the BVH data via the CUs rather than a dedicated ASIC, each RT accelerator is beefier than the previous versions, which hopefully translates into ray tracing performance that stands a chance of competing with Nvidia's efforts. As a result of all this CU reinforcement, the new GPUs are claimed to deliver performance figures comparable to the high-end RX 7900-series cards, despite having a lower total CU count overall. The RX 9070 XT has 64 refreshed CUs total and the RX 9070 makes do with 56 -- compared to the 84 compute units you'd find in the RX 7900 XT, for example. That means the RX 9070 XT ends up with 64 ray accelerators, 128 AI accelerators and 4096 stream processors, compared to the 56 ray accelerators, 112 AI accelerators and 3584 stream processors of the RX 9070 standard. Clock speeds are also much lower for the RX 9070 compared to its bigger brother, with the standard card hitting a boost clock of up to 2,520 MHz compared to the RX 9070 XT's 2,970 MHz top whack. Part of me thinks the 70 MHz on the end of the XT's boost clock is purely for branding reasons (it is the RX 9070-series, after all), but I'd be curious to see what sort of overclocking potential is left on the table here. Nvidia's RTX 50-series GPUs have been reliable overclockers so far, and given all the moves towards CU efficiency with RDNA 4, part of me wonders whether there might be more left to give in the AMD cards, too. We'll find out in due course, I guess. Looking at the architecture overall, it's otherwise a reasonably similar picture to what you'd find in RDNA 3. AMD says it has "optimised and balanced" the cache system, with 64 MB of third gen Infinity Cache, 8 MB of L2 cache (a 2 MB improvement over the 6 MB in RDNA 3) and 2 MB of aggregate CU cache on tap, governed by an improved command processor. Both of the new cards will make use of 16 GB of GDDR6 20 Gbps VRAM a piece, over a 256-bit bus with an effective memory bandwidth of 640 GB/s. They also feature an enhanced media engine for improved encoding quality supporting up to 8K/60 fps streaming and recording via AV1. When it comes to power usage, AMD says the RX 9070 XT has a TBP of 304 W with a recommended PSU wattage of 750 W, while the RX 9070 has a mere 220 W TBP with a 650 W power supply recommendation. Those are some impressively low power figures, particularly given the performance claims. Speaking of which, AMD's performance charts pit the RX 9070 XT against the RX 7900 GRE. That's an upper mid-range card of the RDNA 3 generation, which gives some clues as to where AMD thinks the RX 9070 XT sits in the stack compared to its previous models. It's claimed that the RX 9070 XT delivers between 23% and 48% more performance than the RX 7900 GRE at 4K native Ultra settings in a variety of games, with Cyberpunk 2077 gaining the most frames. The 4K Ultra ray tracing performance comparison, however, shows F1 24 gaining 66% more performance in F1 24 alongside Cyberpunk compared to the older card, suggesting that those ray tracing architectural improvements really might translate into significant real world gains. Still, it's always best to treat figures like this as indicators, rather than cold hard data. It's no surprise that the RX 9070 XT would show significant ray tracing improvements over the RX 7900 GRE as, to be honest, that card was never much cop with the ray tracing goodies enabled. And AMD, like any manufacturer, is always going to present the data that shows off its GPUs at their very best. We'll be putting both the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT through their paces soon in our own independent testing, and that's where we'll get a better idea of the exact performance of the new cards. And I haven't even mentioned FSR 4. Nvidia's RTX 50-series cards lean heavily on DLSS 4 for massive performance gains, and AMD has often felt way behind the curve with its competing upscaling solution, FSR. Previously, FSR was a compute-based upscaler, but the new version finally throws machine learning into the mix thanks to those new AI accelerators on the RDNA 4 cards. Matrix calculations on the RDNA 3 generation cards were handled by non-dedicated architecture on the CUs, whereas the dedicated AI accelerator matrix units fitted to the RX 9070-series have finally brought FSR into the machine learning realm. So yes, that means FSR 4 is RX 9070-series dependent, and older AMD card users (like myself) don't get to play. Still, the machine learning models have been trained on AMD's EPYC and Instinct AI hardware, and the claimed image quality and performance boosts gained as a result look impressive in the screenshots so far. Looking at the first image above, it's clear as to where FSR 3.1 fails in the image-quality stakes. The tops of the spires in the distance show considerable artifacting and missing pixels, whereas FSR 4 appears to do a much better job at preserving image data from native, even at Performance settings. AMD is also claiming a 3.5x uplift in performance in Space Marine 2 at 4K with FSR 4 and frame generation enabled, with significant frame rate gains reported in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Ratchet and Clank, and Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, among others. AMD says that there'll be 30+ games supported at launch, with 75+ coming in 2025 from a variety of developers. Fingers crossed this won't be like FSR 3.1 which still suffers from limited support in many modern releases, although FSR 4 will apparently be a drop in upgrade for games using the FSR 3.1 API. There's also a new version of AMD Fluid Motion Frames on the block, AFMF 2.1. It's claimed to deliver improved frame generation image quality with reduced ghosting and better temporal tracking, and will be supported by AMD RX 6000, 7000 and 9070-series cards alongside the iGPU in Ryzen AI 300 series processors. So, plenty to get excited about here, although whether these cards manage to sell in the face of tough Nvidia competition all depends on pricing and availability. As things currently stand, AMD says the RX 9070-series will be priced in between the $899 launch price of the RX 9700 XT and the $549 RX 9700 GRE, with a separate slide claiming that "85% of gamers buy GPUs <$700. That'll likely mean a $699 launch price for the RX 9070 XT I reckon, although I'm prepared to be surprised. AMD also claims "wide availability" come March 6, from AIBs such as Acer, ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte, Sapphire and more providing bountiful numbers of the new cards. Whether that proves out in practice remains to be seen, but given that it's extremely difficult to get hold of an RTX 50-series card right now at anywhere close to its MSRP, that potentially bodes well for sales if stocks really are as plentiful as AMD says. So, after months of speculation, we finally have some AMD GPU competition on the way. While RDNA 4 doesn't look like a sea change when compared to RDNA 3, key improvements in ray tracing acceleration and AI improvements might just be what the doctor ordered, and I'll be keen to see what those improvements translate to in real world performance when we test them for ourselves. Roll on March 6, that's what I say. The battle of the graphics cards begins once more.

Radeon RX 9070 XT will cost $599, GeForce RTX 5070 Ti performance for $150 less

TL;DR: AMD announced pricing for its RDNA 4 GPUs: the Radeon RX 9070 XT at $599 and the RX 9070 at $549. The RX 9070 XT offers near-par performance to the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti but at a lower cost. RDNA 4 enhances ray-tracing, introduces FSR 4 with AI upscaling, and supports Path Tracing. AMD has finally announced the pricing for its new RDNA 4 GPUs - the Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT. We posted many stories on RDNA 4 earlier today, which you can read below, but during our pre-brief with AMD, the company wasn't quite ready to confirm pricing. Based on the number of leaks from the event, we can understand why. AMD confirmed that the new flagship Radeon RX 9070 XT will launch for $599 USD during its RDNA 4 live stream event that just wrapped up (that you can watch above). AMD also confirmed that 4K performance will be roughly 2% slower than the $749 GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. 2% means performance, on average, should be on par, with AMD's new Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU costing 20% less than NVIDIA's card. AMD notes that partner OC models, pushing the power draw from 304W to 340W, will turn that into a 2% lead over the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. However, as the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti also has OC models, we assume this is compared to the reference MSRP spec. Confusingly, the baseline Radeon RX 9070 will launch for $549 USD, 8% lower than the Radeon RX 9070 XT's price. However, based on AMD's benchmark data, the Radeon RX 9070 will be 20% slower than the Radeon RX 9070 XT - which does bring its value into question. Why not spend a few more dollars and get a noticeably better GPU. It also makes us wonder if the Radeon RX 9070 XT's price was lowered to $599 ahead of the full reveal from a higher price point. Here's AMD's slides comparing the Radeon RX 9070 XT's performance to the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. Of course, there's much more to a modern GPU than raw gaming performance. There's software, and technologies like DLSS and FSR. The good news is that with RDNA 4, AMD is leveling up ray-tracing in a big way, moving FSR 4 to a new AI model for upscaling, and finally embracing Path Tracing and using AI for neural rendering.

Can AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT dethrone Nvidia's RTX-50 series? Let's talk GPU specs

AMD has finally revealed the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 GPUs, and the first question we have is an obvious one: how do these compare to Nvidia's RTX-50 series? It's clear that they have the same AI-infused gaming performance intentions in mind, but Team Red and Team Green are going about doing it differently. Let's get into the specs and talk about what they mean, and where the 9070 and 9070 XT are placed in this ever-growing tapestry of the GPU silicon smackdown. Instead of prolonging this with a lot of build-up text to keep the Google search engine overlords happy, let's just get into the specs table. So, as AMD has made clear and you can see for yourself, RX 9070 and XT are not gunning for the top of the line here. Nvidia's domination on super beefy GPUs continues and it's not worth challenging that. Team Red is gunning for the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti here -- the cards that most people will buy given the (frankly) monstrous pricing of more expensive GPUs. But you may notice a couple other cutbacks in the video memory (GDDR6 over GDDR7 memory) and the drop in total cores. That reveals an intent in the direction AMD is going with its GPUs. Like I said, the raw horsepower is only half the story here, and not AMD's primary focus. Instead, Team Red is rolling the dice and going all in on AI (as you can see by the total AI TOPs). The company's 4th gen FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR 4) and Hypr-RX tech are a huge overhaul of how it approaches frame generation and upscaling -- moving more towards the onboard AI style of things like DLSS 4. And the RDNA 4 architecture doubles down on it with 8x faster AI performance, but also recognizes that ray tracing could be better with third-gen accelerators to provide 2x better RT. This Machine learning-powered upscaling is coming to over 30 games at launch, including: Unsurprisingly, given we got kind of a glimpse of this AI acceleration with the PS5 Pro's PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) tech, a lot of these are Sony titles. But over 75 more are coming by the end of the year, and if AMD is going to stand a chance, this number needs to go up fast. For context, 75 games supported DLSS 4 on the 50-series' launch. Game support has become increasingly crucial to a purchase decision, so AMD's got some catching up to do. But that's not the main reason people are holding out here... At the time of writing this, we don't have official word on pricing (once we do, I'll update this with my thoughts). But this is going to be the big number people are paying attention to. It's clear that with the RDNA 4 architecture, AMD is able to match some of the high framerates in 4K gaming that Nvidia is capable of -- how they price it is crucial. Currently, the only thing we've seen are potential prices on MicroCenter (found by VideoCardz). And...well...I just hope they're placeholders. $649 for the RX 9070 and $699 for RX 9070 XT is too much in the face of RTX 50-series' might of game library support and DLSS 4 tech. Team Green are a little vulnerable right now with low stock at high prices. A true undercut would do the trick in giving AMD a fighting chance, so I'm hoping for these to be $100 less -- meaning $549 for 9070 and $599 for 9070 XT.