AMD Radeon RX 9070 / 9070 XT review: back to winning ways

Let's summarise a little here and break out benchmark results, divided into RT and non-RT. Both AMD and Nvidia have been making RT cards for over four years now, but Radeon cards have continually lagged behind their Nvidia counterparts when it comes to performance in ray-traced games. That is no longer the case, with AMD now being capable of fighting Nvidia for wins on RT performance alone, helped of course by perhaps slightly more aggressive pricing.

Across all games tested at all resolutions, I have the RTX 5070 Ti having an 8 percent RT advantage over the 9070 XT - but the AMD card comes ahead in the value stakes as the 5070 Ti's MSRP is 25 percent higher. Meanwhile, the tables turn with the non-XT vs 5070 comparison, with AMD holding a 5.5 percent RT advantage over Nvidia. Aggregating raster and RT results together - again across all resolutions - 5070 Ti beats 9070 XT by just three percent, while the 9070 non-XT bests the 5070 by nine percent.

And again, using all resolutions aggregated, we can get a sense of overall value too. The RX 9070 XT offers a touch more value than 9070, but not by as huge an amount as many might have feared. On these Sapphire models I tested at least, the deficit in boost clock between the two cards is far less pronounced in real world testing versus the spec sheet. The RTX 5070 isn't a million miles away from 9070, but the gap between the XT and the 5070 Ti is pretty vast, all things considered.

The bottom line though, in terms of hardware capabilities at least, is that AMD is back to winning ways - and this time the key compromises of subpar RT performance and relatively poor upscaling are greatly mitigated.

Of course, that only applies in games where FSR is supported, and DLSS still holds the advantage there, both in terms of the number of games that support upscaling and those that support frame generation. Similarly, AMD's Anti-Lag 2 technology is nowhere near as prevalent as Nvidia's Reflex. Nvidia's new Transformer model for upscaling is still a good deal better than AMD's best, but I wonder how long it'll take AMD to catch up given how impressive FSR 4 is for a first effort.

The Green Team can of course look towards its path tracing titles too - they do run on AMD but not to the same level of performance, even now. In addition to things like dollars per frame, these features do need to be included in any purchasing decision - though the extent to which they are important to you is a matter of taste.

Right now at least, this is the strongest AMD challenge against Nvidia I've seen in years and I look forward to seeing how the face-off continues into the budget heartlands.

AMD Radeon RX 7090 / 7090 XT Analysis

• Introduction
• RT benchmarks: Alan Wake 2, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Cyberpunk 2077
• RT benchmarks: Dying Light 2, F1 24, Hitman: World of Assassination
• RT benchmarks: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, A Plague Tale: Requiem
• Game benchmarks: Alan Wake 2, Black Myth: Wukong, Cyberpunk 2077
• Game benchmarks: F1 24, Forza Horizon 5, Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2
• Game benchmarks: Hitman: World of Assassination, A Plague Tale: Requiem
• Conclusions, value and recommendations [This Page]