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The AMD Radeon RX 9070 16 GB is designed to take on Nvidia's alternatives. With stellar rasterization and improved ray tracing capabilities, Team Red has designed a $549 GPU to compete with the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti. The card brings the new RDNA 4 architecture to the mid-premium segment, replacing the last-gen RX 7800 XT.
AMD has shifted gears this generation: no flagship GPUs, at least for now. The focus is on beating the competition with improved price-to-performance. I got to spend a few weeks with the ASUS TUF Gaming OC variant of the 9070. Let's gauge how well the GPU performs by testing it in the latest titles.
How does the AMD Radeon RX 9070 perform in the latest video games?
We will look at every setting modern games come with: raw rasterization, ray tracing, path tracing, FSR upscaling, and frame generation. Our test includes insanely demanding titles such as Black Myth: Wukong and Cyberpunk 2077, and older titles such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed Mirage, to level the playing field. Counter-Strike 2 has been added as the esports benchmark.
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The system used for our tests is as follows:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X
- Motherboard: Asus ROG X870-A Gaming WiFi
- RAM: 2 x G.Skill Trident Z DDR5-6000 16 GB
- Storage: 1 x Gigabyte Gen 4 NVMe 1 TB, 1 x Patriot P300 M.2 PCIe Gen 3 x 4 128GB
- Cooler: Cooler Master Atmos 240mm liquid cooler
- Storage: Cooler Master MWE 1050W 80+ Gold
- GPU: MSI Ventus 2x RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB
Gaming benchmarks
The AMD RX 9070 ranks among the fastest GPUs on the market. It's no wonder the card pulls through gaming tests with high framerates. Let's look at the detailed performance numbers logged at the resolution.
All the games we tested easily hit 60+ FPS with the highest settings applied (Ultra/Very High presets). Any form of ray tracing and/or upscaling was turned off. The high numbers speak of the insane rasterization capabilities of the RX 9070.
Ray tracing and path tracing
AMD cards have historically lagged in ray tracing and path tracing. While RDNA 4 improves upon the last generation significantly, as we noted in our RX 9070 review, the GPUs still lag behind Blackwell. However, this doesn't mean the card can't do ray tracing. In fact, it's quite good at the task and pulls off playable framerates in all titles at native resolution without any upscaling.
In the path tracing test, the RX 9070 beats the RTX 5060 Ti and the RTX 4070. These results were recorded at 1080p, where the cards have any reasonable shot at pulling off a playable framerate. With this generation, both Nvidia and AMD have started pulling off 30+ FPS, which hints at the growing capabilities of these GPUs in this demanding task.
Upscaling and frame generation tests
FSR upscaling has matured a lot since it was introduced in 2021. These days, the tech delivers comparable performance to DLSS and even beats Nvidia's tech in framerate gains. Across the board, we record 20-30% gains with FSR 2. The newer FSR 3 doesn't deliver significantly better performance numbers. However, the output image quality is subjectively crisper and close to the native resolution.
AMD FSR has been widely adopted in several video games, mostly because it is supported by Nvidia, AMD, and Intel GPUs. This, coupled with the competitive framerate gains, makes the upscaling tech well-positioned for all gamers. Gains are particularly high on the latest cards like the RX 9070, which has native hardware to run the AI models bundled with FSR.
With FSR 3, AMD also introduced frame generation. Support for this isn't as wide as FSR upscaling, but a healthy number of games now support it, and the library is growing by the day. Unlike Nvidia, AMD cards still don't do multi-framerate generation. We recorded framerate gains of about 200% with FSR frame generation.
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 is a powerful 1440p gaming GPU. It performs reasonably well at 4K as well. The GPU is designed for high-framerate gaming and pulls that off without compromises. At its launch MSRP of $549, the card can be a superb recommendation. However, given the inflated prices of GPUs lately, paying $730+ could feel pretty steep.
