Leaked Performance
Now, let’s talk about some really interesting benchmarks that just leaked for AMD’s RX 9070 XT. These numbers are… well, they’re fascinating, to say the least. We’re looking at a 38% improvement over the 7900 GRE at 1440p and 42% at 4K. Now, I can already hear you typing in the comments – “Why are they comparing it to the 7900 GRE and not the 7900 XTX?”
Well, here’s the thing – and AMD knows this – the 9070 XT is actually trading blows with the 7900 XTX in a lot of games. When you look at the numbers compared to the 6900 XT, we’re seeing a 51% improvement at 4K, and if you remember your benchmarks, the 7900 XTX ty pically runs around 40-55% faster than the 6900 XT at 4K. So… yeah, you can see why AMD chose the GRE for their comparison points.
Now, let’s be real for a minute. Based on what we’ve seen from the RTX 5080, it’s still going to have an edge over the 9070 XT in most games. But that’s not necessarily where the real battle is going to be fought. The more interesting comparison is going to be against the RTX 5070 Ti.
Remember – NVIDIA’s positioning that card at $749, and yes before you say it, even if it’s retailing for more. If AMD can get close to that performance level while undercutting the price and – this is crucial – actually having cards available to buy, they could have a winner on their hands.
Now, this is where things get really concerning for AMD. NVIDIA’s DLSS 4 has already launched, and had 75 games supported at launch, that’s not including those which can be upgraded manually by the way, or games which can be manually adjusted using the Nvidia Override feature in the Nvidia App. Once you include those, the numbers exceed over 500 games And FSR 4? Well… it’s not even out yet. When your competitor has that kind of lead in developer support, you’re not just fighting a technology battle anymore – you’re fighting an ecosystem war.
The gap isn’t just about quantity either. DLSS 4 is using transformer models – the same tech powering ChatGPT – and we’ve seen no word that AMD will be using this for FSR4, so it’s fair to say they probably won’t be. NVIDIA’s multi-frame generation can now generate three additional frames for each rendered frame, and it’s 40% faster and uses 30% less VRAM than before so all of the benefits, without the major drawbacks.
What do I think? Well, I think that it's worth waiting a couple of days for the AMD announcement, and then a few more days for reviews. Speculation is nice and all, but we're close enough to the launch that large parts of this article will become irrelevant. Once we get answers to the questions this article raises, then it will be time for a real opinion piece about what AMD offers.
(Of course, there's the chance that you're writing this based on review samples and information that you can't publicly disclose, and just phrasing facts as questions, but even if that's the case, I certainly have no access to such data, and would therefore prefer to not make up my mind before I see the facts.)