AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT provides strong mainstream performance at a great price. The RDNA 4 architecture delivers significant generational improvements in AI and ray tracing performance, without sacrificing rasterization performance. The biggest concerns will be retail availability and pricing — and the lack of any true high-end solutions.

AMD’s Radeon 9070 XT is a solid midrange GPU with excellent support for 1440p gaming and a bit of 4K. It has better ray tracing support than before, it's faster than the plain Radeon 9070 and it finally has AI upscaling to compete with NVIDIA’s DLSS.

Regardless of price, and probably availability as well, the Radeon RX 9070 Series is really impressive. Now I want to see a big RDNA 4 GPU… I know we probably won’t see it this generation, but if the architecture scales at all we could finally see competition at the very top of the gaming segment for the first time in years.

AMD’s GPU division is finally back in business, and we love to see it. The Radeon RX 9070 XT beats the RTX 5070 at just about everything, including ray tracing, and even challenges the 5080 in some tests. It consumes a lot of power, but the bang per buck ratio is amazing.

The Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT offer much faster performance and more memory than Nvidia’s lackluster RTX 5070. Some software bugs mar the experience but overall, AMD’s 9070 graphics cards offer such a compelling mix of performance, value, and memory capacity that it’s worth accepting those quibbles.

Right now, if you’re in the market at around $549 to $600, for most people, the smarter move would be to save a bit more and go for the XT or wait for AMD to discount things to more reasonable levels, though I hope that NVIDIA do the same with the RTX 5070 as realistically, that, and the RX 9070 should be closer to $449. It’s not that the RX 9070 is a terrible card; it’s just that it doesn’t really have a reason to exist in the current lineup—and that, more than anything, is what makes it feel dead on arrival.

The Radeon RX 9070 XT, tested in Sapphire Pulse garb, shows greatly improved ray tracing performance over AMD's last-gen GPUs. Its strong pricing (assuming it holds!) makes it a formidable competitor in the graphics card midmarket.

The Radeon RX 9070 XT, ably demonstrated by this Asus Prime version, is a great price/performance card that takes Nvidia to task on pricing, and shows AMD has taken great strides forward with both RT and AI processing. It could be a hugely consequential GPU, if only the AIBs can keep their worst pricing excesses in check.

If you’re gunning for a new GPU now, and you can’t wait for Nvidia’s stock woes to end, the RX 9070 XT isn’t just a stopgap—it’s the 4K upgrade you wanted. Will you miss out on DLSS 4 and the potential to do over 100 FPS in some games? Yes, you will. At a $150 to $300 discount compared to inflated GeForce prices, that sounds like a fair trade.