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The AMD Radeon RX 9070 16 GB was launched as a high-end gaming GPU in the RDNA 4 lineup. It is the cheaper of the two cards introduced, starting at $549. Its main focus is beating the Nvidia RTX 5070 and the RTX 4070 Super at both pricing and performance. With FSR 4, improved ray tracing, and capable rasterization capabilities, the card makes a very compelling case for itself.
I got to spend a few weeks with the ASUS TUF Gaming OC variant of the GPU, testing gaming, raw rendering, and AI capabilities. While it offers impressive performance, it’s only worth the investment for a specific group of gamers.
In this article, we take a deep dive into the RX 9070, specifically the ASUS TUF Gaming design, and determine which type of consumer will find it worth the investment.
Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective and reflect the writer's opinions.
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What are the specs of the Asus TUF Gaming Radeon RX 9070 16 GB OC?
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 16 GB is designed for high-end 1440p and light 4K gaming. The card bundles the latest improvements with the RDNA 4 lineup, including better rasterization and ray tracing. In terms of the underlying GPU, you get the same Navi 48 as the flagship 9070 XT. However, the $549 design comes with fewer cores and a more power-efficient design.
You get 3,584 Shading Units, 224 Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), 128 Render Output Units (ROPs), and 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. This is unlike the Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, which have shifted to the newer GDDR7 standard.
This card also supports the PCIe Gen 5.0 standard, which, paired with fast 20.1 Gbps memory, brings the total bandwidth up to a respectable 644 GB/s. This is comparable to the RTX 5070's 672 GB/s.
In terms of the look of the Asus TUF Gaming OC variant, you get a beefy three-fan design that will take up three slots in your system. This design is a tier above the Prime RX 9070 and, for now, the flagship variant.
Owing to its high-end cooling solution and the 'OC' moniker, you get a higher boost clock of 2650 MHz, up from the stock card's 2520 MHz. The GPU is fairly large: it's 330mm long, limiting case compatibility. Also, the TGP has been increased to 240W to deliver slightly better performance.
The detailed specs of the GPU are as follows:
The pricing of the ASUS TUF Gaming RX 9070 is heavily skewed by the ongoing GPU shortage. The best deal we found online was $733, much higher than the launch MSRP of $549.
The GPU is going for $1,137 on Amazon, which is a bit worrisome. The same story repeats for the RTX 5070, too: Best Buy, Newegg, B&H, and Amazon have all listed their TUF Gaming variants for $739.
A closer look at the ASUS TUF Gaming RX 9070 OC graphics card
The ASUS TUF Gaming RX 9070 OC GPU is well-built. It continues the highly refined and durable lineup from the Taiwanese GPU maker, with slight tweaks to the aesthetics.
You get several high-end features with this card: Dual BIOS, high-end thermal design, a beefy heatsink, high-end 'TUF'-branded chokes, capacitors, and MOSFETs designed to increase lifespan and system stability, dual-ball fan bearings (the highest-end tech out there), among others.
All of this cooling solution can be a bit overkill for the RX 9070, especially as it's evident the design is a carryover from the RX 9070 XT. This makes the card pretty heavy, too.
While it keeps things very cool under full load, as detailed in our thermal benchmarks, the setup mandates the requirement of a GPU sag bracket.
Test bench
The test bench used for our benchmarks 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: ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon RX 9070 16 GB OC
Synthetic benchmarks
Before delving into gaming and AI tests, let's look at the performance logged by the AMD RX 9070 in a few synthetic tests. They give us an accurate metric to test improvements in raw rendering and ray tracing performance without the added interference and reproducibility issues of gaming framerate tests.
Starting with a DirectX 11 benchmark, the RX 9070 logs a 25% improvement over the last-gen RX 7700 XT. However, the newer card also costs $100 more. It is 5% slower than the last-gen flagship, the RX 7900 XT, and about 25% faster than the RTX 4070.
Since most modern games are DirectX 12, the Time Spy benchmark is a more accurate test of gaming potential. Similar trends continue here — the RX 9070 delivers solid gains over the last-gen RX 7700 XT and the RTX 4070, while being a bit slower than the 24 GB 7900 XTX.
While ray tracing has significantly improved with RDNA 4, it continues to trail behind Nvidia. The GPU is about as fast as the cheaper RTX 5060 Ti in the 3DMark ray tracing feature test, which is a bit embarrassing.
The RX 9070 loses to the last-gen RTX 4070 and achieves less than half the framerate of the RTX 5080, a high-end Blackwell offering.
3DMark Port Royal is a more accurate test of how ray tracing will play out in video games, which uses a mix of native rasterization alongside enhanced lighting techniques. Here, the RX 9070 gains some momentum, as it beats both the RX 7700 XT and the RTX 4070 by a huge margin. We log numbers comparable to the RX 7900 XTX, which reflects the improved hardware packaging of RDNA 4.
3DMark Steel Nomad is a brand-new DirectX 12 Ultimate benchmark from 3DMark. Since our sample size for this test is small, it's difficult to get a meaningful comparison.
As the list of GPUs get longer, we plan to replace the aging DirectX 11 test, which bears little relevance in mid-2025.
Speed Way is another rendering-focused DirectX 12U test. Here, we see a similar trend as Time Spy, as the RX 9070 maintains a healthy lead over the RX 7700 XT and the RTX 4070, while delivering numbers close to the RX 7900 XTX. The GPU beats the RTX 3080 Ti, which is commendable.
The FSR 2 feature test in 3DMark gives us a look at the upscaling capabilites of the GPU. While AMD has launched FSR 3 and 4, with support for frame generation and improved upscaling quality, comparing FSR 2 performance gives us a look at the native AI capabilities of the card.
The gen-on-gen improvements in hardware pay off, as the 9070 gets an 82% increase in performance. This is significantly higher than the 7900 XTX's 69% better results.
Gaming benchmarks
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 is designed for no-compromises 1440p gaming. As evident from our synthetic benchmarks, the card has some potential. We saw these trends reflected in gaming framerates, as the GPU consistently hit 60+ FPS in several demanding modern titles.
Ray tracing performance remains a bit choppy. The GPU loses up to 50% of framerates with the tech turned on, which is higher than what we logged for Blackwell cards.
Moreover, AMD cards don't support multi-frame generation yet. Hence, those gains remain around the 200% margin at best.
Overall, the AMD RX 9070 16 GB is a capable card, but there are drawbacks, especially when compared against the competition. However, when you consider the added VRAM, potentially lower costs, and improved rasterization capabilities, the GPU can make a strong case for itself.
AI and LLM tests
As running language models locally on consumer-grade hardware gets popular, it's important to gauge the performance of modern video cards in this workload as well. GPUs are the workhorse of AI, which means looking at performance capabilities is important if you're considering the RX 9070 in your home lab setup.
Note for AMD cards: Unlike Nvidia CUDA, which has positioned itself as the de facto standard for AI compute backends with fantastic integrations with libraries such as PyTorch, AMD's ROCm is limited. Torch doesn't support it on Windows, which can be a huge let-down for gamers who want to run AI models casually.
That said, AMD supports the open-source Vulkan API too, and you can do quite a few interesting things with it. LLM inference runs particularly well with Vulkan, sometimes even better than CUDA. We ran a few tests with models of varying sizes — 12B and 32B. Let's go through them.
12B models can be fully offloaded to the memory of the RX 9070 (and other 16 GB cards in our test). Hence, this is the most accurate representation of the cards' LLM inference potential. We note the RX 9070 to be significantly faster than the RTX 5060 Ti, but much slower than the RTX 5080.
Multi-GPU setups fare worse than a single card in this scenario because moving data between two GPUs adds latency that can be easily avoided by offloading the whole model into one card.
32B models present a unique scenario, as a significant portion of the model has to be offloaded to the main memory (RAM). This adds tremendous amounts of latency, slowing down inference.
The RX 9070 is far slower than the RTX 5060 Ti and the RTX 5080, despite having much better native AI capabilities. This can be attributed to the slower GDDR6 standard used in RDNA 4.
However, multi-GPU setups may pay off in this use case. With Vulkan, we consistently recorded high inference speeds, and the RX 9070 + RTX 5080 setup gave us the best results.
Temperature and power draw characteristics
Temperature and power draw characteristics are important considerations if you're eyeing the TUF Gaming RX 9070 OC for your gaming setup. Given the high-end components Asus has paired the video card with, we expect it to perform reasonably well. The GPU, however, far surpassed our estimates.
Note: Ambient temperatures for all temperature tests: 21°C.
When stressed with the Furmark 2 GPU torture system load, the power draw characteristics are surprisingly well-behaved. This primarily stems from the high-end VRMs and MOSFETs used under the hood.
The card hit a maximum draw of 237.99W, which it sustained consistently throughout the test, reflecting maturity in GPU design from Asus.
The temperatures reflect a similar trend. On average, the card stayed around 48-49°C, which is awesome for a card of this stature. That said, memory junction temperatures log ~85°C, which is typical of GDDR6 chips.
In gaming, we note similar stability in power draw characteristics. The GPU logs a maximum of 235W when stressed with Cyberpunk 2077 at UHD with RT Ultra settings. We specifically chose this workload because it offloads most of the work to the GPU, making the system inherently GPU-bound, limiting major impact from the CPU and/or other components in the system.
While gaming, the card logged a maximum of 57°C, which is among the best you can get from high-end GPUs. Memory junction temperatures did scale up to 82°C, reflecting the trend observed in the Furmark 2 test.
Value and conclusion
Overall, the AMD RX 9070 represents a classic mixed bag of thoughts — it is equally impressive and disappointing. While the card sure has rendering and AI compute potential, several factors cripple it from being a no-brainer recommendation. Pricing is a key concern, coupled with poor ray tracing, the absence of multi-frame generation, and limited support for ROCm.
We only recommend gamers buy the AMD RX 9070 if you get it at MSRP. At $734, it's hard to justify the 9070 over its Nvidia counterparts. However, if you need the extra VRAM for AI, don't mind setting up Linux, and or have a multi-GPU setup running, the RX 9070 can be a fantastic option.
The ASUS TUF Gaming OC variant is particularly recommended for its high-end components. This is more relevant if you'll be doing AI on your rig, as consistently high system load can cause significant wear and tear on the components.
