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The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is currently the highest-end offering from Team Red. Priced at $599, the GPU directly competes with the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti from Team Green. The card boasts strong rasterization, improved ray tracing, and FSR 4 support. While Nvidia has been criticized for being conservative with gen-on-gen improvements and VRAM counts, AMD offers a handsome 16 GB with both its 70-class GPUs, offering strong future-proofing in the mid-premium market.
We tested the 9070 XT in a variety of benchmarks. Read on to find how the GPU performed at 1440p and 4K resolutions in our tests.
How does the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT perform while playing the latest video games?
The RX 9070 XT was tested with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, the highest-end CPU in the Zen 5 lineup. We tested it on the Asus Prime X870-P WiFi board, which ships with PCIe Gen 5 support. 32 GB of DDR5-6000 memory and a Cooler Master 1050W power supply were used to provide ample system resources to sustain the demanding requirements of the high-end CPU and GPU.
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The testbench is as follows:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
- Motherboard: Asus Prime X870-P 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: ASUS TUF Gaming RX 9070 XT 16 GB
Gaming benchmarks
The AMD RX 9070 XT is primarily a high-resolution gaming GPU. We tested it only at 1440p and 4K, as 1080p isn't relevant for a $600 card. Our test suite includes:
- Counter-Strike 2, an esports representative.
- Black Myth Wukong, a current-gen graphics-intensive title.
- Monster Hunter Wilds, another current-gen gameplay dynamics and graphics-heavy game.
- Spider-Man 2 for its diverse support of upscaling and ray tracing.
- Cyberpunk 2077, as it's a standardized graphics benchmark.
- Fortnite, which offers a mix of software and hardware-based rendering techniques such as Lumen and Nanite.
Let's start with pure rasterization benchmarks at 1440p.
The RX 9070 XT is quite capable at QHD. Across the titles tested at the highest settings, we consistently logged 75+ FPS. This reflects the quality of hardware bundled with the GPU.
The RX 9070 XT performs strongly at 4K as well, delivering playable FPS across titles. Fortnite with Nanite and Lumen turned on represents a pretty challenging benchmark, where the card maintained 46 FPS on average. The gameplay wasn't very smooth, reflecting a limitation at native UHD gaming.
Ray tracing and path tracing
With the RDNA 4 lineup, AMD has further improved its ray tracing and path tracing formula. The GPU can now consistently hit playable framerates at native QHD resolutions with the highest graphics options applied. That being said, 4K remains a bit out of reach for the GPU.
Cyberpunk 2077 and Spider-Man 2 dipped below a playable 30 FPS with the highest RT settings applied at UHD. The performance dip over native rasterization is more than 50%, suggesting that RT remains a demanding workload, unlike Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs.
Path tracing usually brings Nvidia Blackwell cards to their knees, hence we weren't surprised to see the RX 9070 XT struggle with this workload. Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p got close to a playable 30 FPS with the highest graphics settings applied.
However, at 4K, the card only did 6 FPS. This number isn't representative of the GPU's true rendering potential. It likely suggests the rendering got bottlenecked by the VRAM buffer or other system resources.
Upscaling and frame generation tests
AMD FSR 3 continues to remain the most widely supported upscaling tech across several titles. Official FSR 4 and AFMF support is limited, and we couldn't find support for the technologies in any of the titles we tested.
Regardless, FSR 3 is pretty strong when it comes to framerate gains over native. The output image quality isn't the best, however, the results are competitive when you compare them with Nvidia's DLSS 4.
Here are the performance numbers logged with the GPU at QHD and 4K resolutions.
Across the board, gains vary between 20 and 30% with FSR 3 set to the Performance preset. Black Myth Wukong is an outlier in our tests as the GPU failed to exhibit any meaningful gains at 1440p. This is likely because the game is very demanding at QHD resolutions.
FSR 3 bundles support for legacy 2x frame generation. With the setting, we recorded 170-180% performance uplifts. Black Myth Wukong is the only title where gains remained below 100%. This is likely because the base framerate that has to be multiplied from dips below the recorded 56 FPS at native. The added resource demand of the AI frame generation model could be a reason why.
The RX 9070 XT remains a competitive video card for 1440p gaming. 4K has a few quirks, as mentioned. However, if you're willing to dial down the settings slightly, the card can do a wonderful job while running most of the latest titles.
That said, the GPU is a 70-class offering. If rumors are anything to go by, AMD might introduce higher-end RX 9080 and 9090 cards later this year with improved gaming and ray tracing performance. In this backdrop, the 9070 XT delivers a solid high-end experience for the price.
