AMD has finally fully unveiled its first next-generation graphics cards, the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. According to the manufacturer, the new products focus on what is important to gamers themselves: high-resolution support, performance, easy upgrades, and an affordable price.
Image source: AMD
The Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics cards are built on a GPU with the latest RDNA 4 graphics architecture, which offers a number of improvements and optimizations designed to increase both overall performance and speed in games. In particular, the computing units responsible for accelerating ray tracing have received a significant update.
Now, these are third-generation RT accelerators, which have double the number of ray intersection processing units, improved RT stack management and BVH compression, and a number of other improvements. AMD notes a two-fold increase in ray tracing throughput compared to RDNA 3. In addition, the company announced that its new products will also cope with path tracing – this is an improved version of ray tracing, in simple terms.
The AI accelerators have also been updated, with AMD promising up to eight times the performance of RDNA 3 in AI tasks. This was achieved through support for new 8-bit floating-point number formats, increased matrix computation density, and other improvements.
The Radeon RX 9070 XT is built around a 64-CU GPU, meaning it has 4,096 stream processors, 256 texture units (TMUs), 96 ROPs, 64 RT accelerators, and 128 AI acceleration units. The GPU has a maximum boost clock of a respectable 2.97 GHz, but manufacturers will likely offer cards with factory overclocks above 3 GHz.
In turn, the Radeon RX 9070 has eight fewer CUs and, accordingly, offers 3584 stream processors, 56 RT cores and 112 AI accelerators. This GPU operates at a significantly lower clock frequency – the reference Boost frequency is only 2.52 GHz.
Both graphics cards are equipped with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory with an effective frequency of 20,000 MHz, a 256-bit bus and a total bandwidth of 640 GB/s. The PCIe 5.0 interface is used for connection. Each model has three DisplayPort 2.1a ports and one HDMI 2.1b for image output. The power consumption of the older model reaches 304 W, and the younger one – 220 W. In this indicator, AMD graphics cards are close to Nvidia analogues – GeForce RTX 5070 and GeForce RTX 5070 Ti consume 250 and 300 W, respectively.
As for performance, AMD shared rather modest details. The company compared both Radeon RX 9070 series cards with the Radeon RX 7900 GRE, a cheaper version of the previous generation flagship. As a result, the Radeon RX 9070 XT outperformed the Radeon RX 7900 GRE by 42% in 4K and by 38% in 1440p. AMD also noted the superiority of the older new product over the Radeon RX 6900 XT in games at 4K resolution by 51% and over the GeForce RTX 3090 by 26%.
In turn, the younger new product turned out to be on average 21% faster in games at 4K resolution (3840 × 2160 pixels) and 20% faster in 1440p (2560 × 1440 pixels). The younger model also outperformed the Radeon RX 6800 XT in games by 38% and the GeForce RTX 3080 by 26%, both at 4K.
Along with the new graphics cards, AMD introduced FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4), an AI image scaling technology developed specifically for the RDNA 4 architecture. It provides high image quality and low latency. AMD promises that the Radeon RX 9070 XT with FSR 4 will be able to increase FPS by 2.1 to 3.7 times, depending on the game. More than 30 games will support the new technology at launch, with over 75 more to receive support in 2025. AMD has also simplified the integration process for developers with FSR 4.
In addition to the new AI scaling technology, the company introduced an updated version of Fluid Motion Frames 2.1 (AFMF 2.1) – an additional frame generator that significantly increases FPS and works at the driver level, making it suitable for use in any game. In the new version, AMD has improved the quality of frame generation and reduced the number of artifacts.
AFMF 2.1 can be enabled on its own or as part of the HYPR-RX suite of technologies, which also includes FSR, Anti-Lag, Radeon Boost, and Radeon SR. AMD has shown that enabling HYPR-RX can improve gaming frame rates by 2.2 to 3 times at 4K resolution.
AMD has confirmed that the Radeon RX 9070 series will go on sale in a week, on March 6. The recommended price of the Radeon RX 9070 XT is $599, and the junior Radeon RX 9070 is priced at $549. AMD will not sell reference versions of the video cards, but will entrust the distribution of new products to its partners.
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