Review AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 review: An excellent value, if supply is good

[Jabberwocky79]

10 total models available on Newegg... 6 of them are already OOS

 

[valthuer]

Still, AMD has a lot of ground to cover just to catch up to Ada, let alone Blackwell on AI.

That's the most disappointing thing about AMD, despite their improved GPUs; they have quit the high-end market, so we won't get the chance to see better cards than Nvidia's flagships.

 

[DRagor]

Cheapest no XT in Poland are 600$, XT are 700$. No MSRP at all, not even in listings.

 

[oofdragon]

I watched the HUB review, since it came out first. The short of it: 9070XT = 7900XT (not XTX), both in perf and power consumption. So if you think Nvidia (Huang) lied about 5070's perf, then AMD also lied.

People are still clueless about marketing. It doesn't lie. It stretches the truth (exaggerates). That's its job. Every company does it. If you're worked up over it, and think that one side lies and the other doesn't, you've been suckered.

About pricing: Now we see the real reason for XT's $600 pricing, a climb down from the anticipated $650-700. XT is not as fast as Ti, and uses more power. A $50 price diff wouldn't have mattered, so XT got a haircut and diff is now $150, which theoretically allows XT to win on bang/buck, since it can't win on the bang.

The price drop wasn't about AMD being nice to gamers. It's just competitive positioning. If you think one company cares about you and the other doesn't, that's just another lie. But this time, it's you lying to yourself.

I say "XT theoretically wins," because dollars to donuts MSRP parts will be instantly OOS just like 5070 is. If you think the 2-month "stockpile" can overcome scalpers, I envy you your optimism.

Yes, the conventional wisdom is to wait for prices to "settle" and inventory to "catch up." People have short memory, and they forgot how it was during the crypto boom. Inventory won't catch up. The clue is that all the alternatives, previous gen parts, are also OOS or marked up to heaven. Demand will rise as we get into the holiday seasons, when people traditionally buy electronics. Your best chance is to do what scalpers do and use a buy bot, because it won't get better.

Lol what????? The 9070XT>XTX. You just saw a Nvidia shill YT channel review. Here is an avg from TP 14 games:

14 Avg
5080: 124,17
9070XT: 115,97
7900XTX: 113,9 (+2%)
5070Ti: 111.35


~Alan Wake 2
5080: 104.5
9070XT 106.1
5070Ti 93
7900XTX 102.4

~Assassin's Creed Mirage
5080: 145.6
9070XT 157.4
5070Ti 136.4
7900XTX 138.3

Baldies Gate 3
5080: 186.8
9070XT: 175.4
5070Ti: 168.8
7900XTX: 180.2

~Cyberpunk 2077
5080: 142.9
9070XT: 134.3
5070Ti: 125.2
7900XTX: 129.2

~Ghost of Tsushima
5080: 134.8
9070XT: 137.7
5070Ti: 119.4
7900XTX: 121.1

~God of War Ragnarok
5080: 148.4
9070XT: 132.7
5070Ti: 133.1
7900XTX: 120.2

Hogwarts Legacy
5080: 107
9070XT: 94
5070Ti: 94.8
7900XTX: 94.5

~Horizon Forbidden West
5080: 130.5
9070XT: 122.8
5070Ti: 116.2
7900XTX: 118.3

Resident Evil 4
5080: 156.5
9070XT: 152.4
5070Ti: 140.3
7900XTX: 165.5

~Silent Hill 2
5080: 79.7
9070XT: 58
5070Ti: 71.6
7900XTX: 56.3

Stalker 2
5080: 91
9070XT: 77
5070Ti: 84
7900XTX: 76

Star field
5080: 110
9070XT: 105.4
5070Ti: 101.2
7900XTX: 111.1

Star Wars Outlaws
5080: 87.1
9070XT: 74.3
5070Ti: 74.5
7900XTX: 68.5

The Last of Us
5080: 113.6
9070XT: 96.1
5070Ti: 100.5
7900XTX: 105.9

 

[Heat_Fan89]

Amazon has the XFX OC versions for preorder although they are going for $815 and $840. I want one but i'm not sure I want them that bad.

 

[Masterpic]

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 offer excellent performance and value, especially for gamers and content creators. However, their value is highly dependent on supply availability. If supply is stable, they provide great performance at a competitive price.

 

[stuff and nonesense]

Lol what????? The 9070XT>XTX. You just saw a Nvidia shill YT channel review. Here is an avg from TP 14 games

I agree, he damned the 9070xt with faint praise, his voice dropping at the end of sentences where he had to say something good about the card.

It wasn’t pleasant to watch. Perhaps HUB are scared Nvidia will cut them off again as they did because HUB didn’t push the 20x0 features enough.

 

[Jabberwocky79]

Amazon has the XFX OC versions for preorder although they are going for $815 and $840. I want one but i'm not sure I want them that bad.

If only I knew there would be water block options for the exact card I bought I would be pulling the trigger right now. 🤔

EDIT: No, I guess I won't... everything is already OOS 😕. Geez this is stupid 🙄

 

[JayGau]

I just checked for the fun of it (9070 XT) and it's exactly like I said. Only one model at MSRP, everything else is anywhere between 750$ and 1000$. And they are ALL out of stock. This is so much better than Nvidia right?

p.s. Nobody cares if your Micro Center has some. They have stock for a reason: they don't sell online and there are so few stores that basically nobody can go there unless they are willing to drive for hours.

 

[stuff and nonesense]

I just checked for the fun of it (9070 XT) and it's exactly like I said. Only one model at MSRP, everything else is anywhere between 750$ and 1000$. And they are ALL out of stock. This is so much better than Nvidia right?

p.s. Nobody cares if your Micro Center has some. They have stock for a reason: they don't sell online and there are so few stores that basically nobody can go there unless they are willing to drive for hours.

It would be interesting to know how well stocked the retailers were, real numbers..

Makes me wonder how much is scalpers and how much is real demand.

 

[palladin9479]

Ok so far Microcenter has a ton of them at MSRP along with OC / custom models at higher prices.

https://www.microcenter.com/search/...chPartial&NTT=9070+XT&NTK=all&sortby=pricelow

Newegg is sold out and I don't see any posted on Amazon. Best buy is also sold out except the higher end OC model at $849. Think that was the model that performed close to a reference 7900 XTX.

 

[palladin9479]

It would be interesting to know how well stocked the retailers were, real numbers..

Makes me wonder how much is scalpers and how much is real demand.

People had purchase bots lined up for anything being sold online. Microcenter seems to have healthy stock so either they were preferred or there was a ton of scalping bots setup for everyone else.

 

[stuff and nonesense]

People had purchase bots lined up for anything being sold online. Microcenter seems to have healthy stock so either they were preferred or there was a ton of scalping bots setup for everyone else.

Sad…

 

[bit_user]

p.s. Nobody cares if your Micro Center has some. They have stock for a reason: they don't sell online and there are so few stores that basically nobody can go there unless they are willing to drive for hours.

Best Buy has some in-store inventory, no? What about Target and Walmart?

 

[palladin9479]

Lol what????? The 9070XT>XTX. You just saw a Nvidia shill YT channel review. Here is an avg from TP 14 games:

Short answer, no.

Long answer, it depends.

In rasterization the 7900 XTX handily beats the 9070 XT, you don't overcome a 50% memory bandwidth advantage. In RT the 9070 XT either matches or beats the 7900 XTX game depending. The Radeon 7000 series had terrible RT performance and most of the advancements this generation went to improving the RT capabilities.

You can make the numbers whatever you want by just mix and matching select RT titles into the mix but when separated and analyzed separately it becomes a very clear picture.

Updating this with the raw specs to show how much the 9070 XT has to punch above it's weight.

7900 XTX Reference
Core Config
6144:384:192:96:192
96 CU
Clock: 2371/2500Mhz
Memory: 384-bit GDDR6 20Gbps 960GB/s
TDP: 355W

9070 XT Reference
Core Config
4096:256:128:64:128
64 CU
Clock: 2400/2970Mhz
Memory: 256-bit GDDR6 20Gbps 640GB/s
TDP: 304W

The 9070 XT is an entire weight class under the 7900 XTX and while it can't compete in brute performance (Rasterization), it can compete in specialized performance (RT) while getting "close enough" for it's value. Remember the 7900XTX is a 80/90 class card.

 

[bit_user]

most of the advancements this generation went to improving the RT capabilities.

Also AI, which should help with FSR4.

That said, the improvements weren't enough to catch Nvidia, in this area. Software support, memory capacity, and memory bandwidth are also holding back the RX 9070 XT as a true AI card.

 

[palladin9479]

For the typical average gamer AMD fixed the drivers at least 5 years ago and never looked back.
The shtick about them having bad drivers is propaganda from people trying to discredit them to charge their confirmation bias that they made the correct purchase.
No one likes to feel or be made to feel that they made a bad or not the 'best' buy. Doesn't matter what it is, automobiles, power tools, washer and dryer sets, and certainly PC hardware.

AMD GPU drivers are fine at doing their job. There are some quirks that they are still working out, things like driver enforced V-Sync not behaving consistently across applications with some just ignoring it entirely. The control panel itself is clunky with nVidia's classic panel being easier to use though GeForce Experience was terrible. So yeah, it's mostly just cosmetic or interactivity issues, the core functionality of rendering triangles into frames works great.

 

[abufrejoval]

So the 9070 series was put up for sale about 45 minutes ago across Europe.

No RX 9070 XT was below €950, quite a few around €1100: they were gone in seconds.
One or two 9070 survived for 30 minutes at €800, but the last one is now gone as well.

I had set the price alarm at €800 for the RX 9070 XT, clearly I now know why I got no notifcations...

A well, I was hoping to get a bit of an upgrade for my daughter's RTX 3070, but she'll just have to hang tight.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

AMD GPU drivers are fine at doing their job. There are some quirks that they are still working out, things like driver enforced V-Sync not behaving consistently across applications with some just ignoring it entirely. The control panel itself is clunky with nVidia's classic panel being easier to use though GeForce Experience was terrible. So yeah, it's mostly just cosmetic or interactivity issues, the core functionality of rendering triangles into frames works great.

People rarely talk about the real-world experience of various drivers, just nebulous statements. I will say I encounter oddities with AMD more than with Nvidia, but for the RDNA 4 launch things were mostly smooth. Why only mostly? I'll give you one concrete example.

I installed and tested the RX 9070 XT card. Everything went fine. When finished, I shut down the PC and installed the RX 9070 card. And... nothing. Oh, I saw the POST screen, but the Windows login screen never came up. But the PC was alive! I could ping it! So I tried remotely connecting. Nothing. I futzed around for possibly 30 minutes, wondering if I had a DOA 9070 sample.

So then I tried it in my old testbed, and had the exact same problem. Nothing. Sigh... more time wasted. But then I though, "You know, I had the 9070 XT in both systems. I wonder if the drivers are failing to load because they're looking for the 9070 XT and crapping out when they find the 9070?" So I put the 9070 into my even older 12900K testbed, and it booted right up to Windows. (No drivers installed yet.)

I then had to put the 9070 XT back into my testbed, boot into Windows, run Display Driver Uninstaller to wipe out the drivers, shutdown and put the 9070 in... and it worked.

I wish I could say this was a rare occurrence, but AMD GPUs don't really seem to like switching between graphics cards. Usually I'll get the PC to boot and the first launch it will BSOD and restart and then work. Other times, it will boot but act like no AMD drivers are installed, so I need to reinstall the drivers. On Nvidia, though, swapping between cards while using the same drivers almost never causes issues.

So why not just wipe the drivers every time I swap? I could, I probably should, but sometimes you don't want to wait an extra 10 minutes to wipe, shutdown, swap cards, boot, reinstall. Remember: MASSIVE time crunch for the past couple of weeks.

------------

Now, that's the AMD side. Nvidia's drivers with Blackwell are still problematic in a couple of games in my test suite. Minecraft at "ultra" (24 RT render chunks) doesn't work right on the 9800X3D system at 1080p, sort of 1440p and 4K. The slower the card (i.e. 5070) the less problematic it is. But the 5090? It runs terribly right now in Minecraft at 1080p — but not with 8 RT render chunks setting. This has been a known issue since early January now.

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 also has some performance oddities. On both AMD and Nvidia Blackwell, performance is capped to around 150~170 FPS. Put in an RTX 40-series GPU and suddenly it will hit 200+ FPS. Again, Nvidia is aware of this but hasn't provided a fix in nearly two months. It did fix weaker than expected 1080p medium/ultra results for quite a few games compared to the launch 5090 drivers at least.

The black screens on Nvidia are another example of issues. I sent an MSI Suprim Liquid SOC back because I couldn't finish all the tests and MSI offered no explanation. Two days after I shipped it back, it released a VBIOS update to fix black screen issues and Nvidia put out new drivers. LOL. Why couldn't anyone just tell me, "Yes, we're aware of the problem and a fix is impending?" and save me almost a week of chasing my tail?

And how on earth did a bunch of GPUs with one missing ROPS cluster get shipped out? The "bad batch" explanation doesn't hold water, since it happened on 5090, 5080, and 5070 Ti cards IIRC. None of the cards I have exhibited this problem, but that's two completely different chips and three configurations, so it wasn't a single "batch."

The bottom line is that new architectures are usually far more problematic from a drivers standpoint. It's surprising how bad things can get, and AMD and Nvidia have been less kind to the AIBs lately in order to try to lessen the number of leaks. I'm pretty sure the entire 40-series was leaked weeks before it launched. The 5090 and 5080 had plenty of rumors but a LOT of wrong information that obviously wasn't leaked, just bad guesses.

/notes from testing new GPUs...

 

[palladin9479]

People rarely talk about the real-world experience of various drivers, just nebulous statements. I will say I encounter oddities with AMD more than with Nvidia, but for the RDNA 4 launch things were mostly smooth. Why only mostly? I'll give you one concrete example.

Well new releases are always going to be hit / miss, the mad rush to release a "working" product leaves almost no time for a proper SDLC approach complete with QA test cases / etc. Instead it's always a case of "kludge something together to just make it work" on day 1, followed by several new driver versions being released over a month to address all the issues that unpaid beta testers (that's us) find.

Like for AMD, when you startup the Radeon control panel the first few times it can take forever to load, I'm talking 15+ minutes. I thought something crashed but nope, turns out it was just scanning through my massive Steam library and Program Files folder to build all the data for the "Gaming" panel. Couple of restarts later and now it opens quickly. The VSync setting I mentioned works well on all OpenGL and DX9 games, most DX11 games and is 50/50 on DX12 or Vulkan games.

I ended up having to use DXVK and apply this setting to force a game to use proper vsync.
dxgi.syncInterval = 1

 

[drivinfast247]

There are no reference models.

And no AIB is going to sell at msrp.

So where do you get that?

FYI: A couple models available at MSRP @ Microcenter.

 

[palladin9479]

FYI: A couple models available at MSRP @ Microcenter.

Was a pile of base models at MSRP, most have sold out at the big MC near me but they have plenty of the $750 hellhounds, which is still cheap for it's performance. Lots of us bought a 7900 XTX for $800~850 in the last few months and the 9070 XT is right under that in performance, title depending, so $750 for a factory OC'd model with better cooling still lands it in a decent price/perf range in this market.

It's the $800+ models I heavily disagree with.

 

[drivinfast247]

Not sure if this has been posted yet.

https://videocardz.com/newz/retaile...o-first-shipments-price-set-to-increase-later

 

[SyCoREAPER]

Supply was good at my Microcenter. They got over 100 XT cards and still have plenty left

 

[palladin9479]

Not sure if this has been posted yet.

https://videocardz.com/newz/retaile...o-first-shipments-price-set-to-increase-later

Same guys who did a "controlled leak" and now doing a rumor ... so yeah ok.

It's all about which models the AIB partners release. The Fairfax MC near me has sold hundreds of cards today, like all day long they were selling 9070's and 9070 XT's. This isn't like the nVidia launch where they had something like 30 or 40 units to sell.

PowerColor sells four models,

Base model no OC $599, no bells or whistles.
PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Reaper Triple Fan
https://www.microcenter.com/product...r-triple-fan-16gb-gddr6-pcie-50-graphics-card

OC'd model with LEDs 749.99
PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Hellhound Overclocked Triple Fan
https://www.microcenter.com/product...d-triple-fan-16gb-gddr6-pcie-50-graphics-card

OC'd stylish model with ARGB puke 789.99
PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Red Devil Overclocked Triple
https://www.microcenter.com/product...d-triple-fan-16gb-gddr6-pcie-50-graphics-card

Limited edition OC'd stylish model with ARGB puke 849.99
https://www.microcenter.com/product...d-triple-fan-16gb-gddr6-pcie-50-graphics-card
PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Red Devil Limited Edition Overclocked Triple Fan

They are not all the same and while the LE is kinda dumb, there are people who will buy it just for the badge. Sapphire and XFX do the same thing, have a basic SKU then a bunch of factory OC'd cards with RGB puke.