High-end graphics cards
We reveal how AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT compare to the latest cards from Nvidia: the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti
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MD had one job to do with the launch of its RDNA 4 graphics cards – spearheaded by the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT – and that was to not get run over by Nvidia’s Blackwell too badly this generation.
With the RX 9070 XT in particular, not only does AMD hold its own against the GeForce RTX monolith, it perfectly positions Team Red to take advantage of the discontent among gamers upset over the price and availability of Nvidia’s latest GPUs. Not just the RTX 5080 and 5090 we reviewed last month (see issue 367, p46), but also the newly released RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti.
We expect Nvidia to launch the RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti in the coming weeks, but for now we must content ourselves with comparing the four cards that might be called “high end”. And close to the top: as we’ll see, the Radeon RX 9070 XT comes very close to the GeForce RTX 4080 in 4K and 1440p gaming performance.
AMD’s RDNA 4 cards
Last month we went into detail on Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture, so we’ll focus here on AMD’s RDNA 4.
It’s built on TSMC’s N4P node, the same as Nvidia Blackwell, and in a move away from AMD’s multi-chip module (MCM) push with the last generation, the RDNA 4 GPU is a monolithic die. You can see how the Navi 48 GPU in the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT compares with the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti cards in the table below, but there’s no shortage of silicon. For instance, the RX 9070 XT sports 64 compute units, breaking down into 64 ray accelerators, 128 AI accelerators and 64MB of L3 cache. Its cores are clocked at 1,600MHz to start, but can run as fast as 2,970MHz.