Just yesterday, we saw the RTX 5070 launch from NVIDIA. A card that was firmly set at $549 with some bold claims to take on the market, and be the perfect upgrade from the RTX 3070, though sadly it fell short by just not offering enough to consumers where it mattered, though today it’s the turn of AMD with two cards launching by way of the RX 9070, and 9070 XT. Priced at $549 and $599 respectively, can AMD get back to their roots of offering up similar performance for a lower price, or will they fall into the same old trap of just missing the mark, not reading the room and getting it completely wrong? Well that’s what we’re going to find out.
Ok, so price. This is the big one, as AMD haven’t exactly made it easy for themselves. They started by briefing press on their RDNA4 lineup pre-CES, to then completely axe it from their presentation, seemingly because they didn’t have time, which in all honesty, comes across like a blatant lie. I get that AI is a big thing for them, but they could have shaved off a minute of their AI speak, to make way for something to do with RDNA, I mean, anything.
Beyond that, press were invited onto briefing calls where we learnt everything about the cards….again, apart from the price. Were AMD deliberately being coy about the whole pricing thing, or were they waiting to get an idea as to what the RTX 5070 was going to offer? Only AMD knows, but I can safely say that a lot of chatter was going on behind the scenes, as due to AMD’s market share dropping on the GPU side of the business, they have to get this right, though with two cards launching with a $50 price disparity, it does almost feel like history is repeating itself, like we saw with the RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT, though I’m bold enough to say that I’m happy to eat my own words if I’m wrong, and that’s what we’ll find out today.
Now let’s talk specs, because it’s always good to see what’s on offer, especially with 2 cards launching, as we can make direct comparisons between them. Now I will say that AMD aren’t, despite what you’ve seen in any of their sales or marketing material, launching an MBA card of reference card for either of these models, which is frustrating, as in every presentation we’ve seen, they actually look pretty decent from a visual standpoint, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be, and instead, we are reliant on partner cards, of which, while we do have various models from different AIBs, we made the choice to go with the Sapphire Pulse RX 9070 and Gigabyte Gaming OC RX 9070 XT. We do have other models that are maybe more exotic shall we say, but today is all about baseline performance and not heavy pre-factory overclocks and we want to get to, or as close to MSRP levels of performance as we can, because anything you spend above MSRP, should obviously get you higher overclocks, better cooling and, while it may be small, better performance.
Built upon the latest RDNA4 architecture, the RX 9070 comes packing 3584 stream processors, while the XT comes in with 4096. We also get 128 ROPs on both cards, along with 56 ray accelerators and 112 AI accelerators on the RX 9070, while the XT expands on that more with 64 ray accelerators, and 128 AI accelerators. Both cards come packing 64MB of Infinity cache, and 16GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit memory interface, which will provide up to 640GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Power wise, the 9070 has a TDP of 220W and AMD recommend a minimum PSU wattage of 650W, while the XT comes in a little higher at 304W, and a recommended PSU recommendation of 750W. Beyond that, AIB’s have been given the green light for overclocked models to push the TDP higher, up towards 340W to achieve enhanced levels of performance, and this does mean, in the case of the Sapphire Nitro+ for instance, that we now see AMD adopting, in places, a 12V 2×6 connector, though that’s something we’ll discuss more when we look at those cards individually in the very near future.
Now in terms of clock speeds, the RX 9070 comes with a base clock, or as they call it, game frequency of 2070MHz, a boost speed of 2520MHz, and a memory speed of 2518MHz or 20 Gbps Effective, while the 9070 XT takes this quite a bit further with a base clock of 2400MHz, a boost clock of 2970MHz and the same 2518MHz memory clock speed.
Now we all know, AMD generally tend to have higher clock speeds, but this doesn’t always translate to raw performance, so it will be interesting to see how the red team can bring the fight to the competition, especially given their $549 and $599 price points.
