AMD finally gets it just right, RX 9070 XT benchmarked vs 7800XT & Nvidia RTX 4070

AMD reached out to us asking if we were interested in testing the Radeon RX 9070 XT.

We will be pitching it against the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 VENTUS 2X 12G, and Gigabyte Radeon RX 7800 XT GAMING OC 16G seeing as they are in a similar price class and also because AMD has pitted it against 70-series GeForce GPU and the 4070 happens to be just that from last gen. (This review focuses on the gaming side, we have a separate one if you are interested in AI performance.)

Before we get underway, this is a collaboration between Steven Parker (author), and Sayan Sen who also provided the benchmark graphics and data points.

First up the specs of the 9070, and 9070 XT which were given to us by AMD:

The list price according to AMD is given as $599 for the 9070 XT, and $549 for the 9070, but it's anyone's guess what card manufacturers will do with these prices.

The Sapphire Pulse is a three slot design with two 8-pin connectors, and at a (self measured) 32.5cm it can only be installed in our NR200P Max system by taking off the back plate, which hold the rear of the GPU in place. For size it resembles a 7900 XTX, even though our 7900 XTX Phantom Gaming is actually a two slot design.

On the left Sapphire Pulse 9070 XT, on the right RX 7900 XTX Phantom Gaming 24GB OC

As you can see, the 7900 XTX still edges out the Sapphire Pulse in size, but only just, and also if we ignore the larger three slot design on the rear of the card.

Test system

Our test system consists of the following

• Cooler Master MasterBox NR200P MAX
• ASRock Z790 PG-ITX/TB4
• Intel Core i7-14700K with Thermal Grizzly Carbonaut Pad
• T-FORCE Delta RGB DDR5 (2x16GB) 7600MT/s CL36 (XMP Profile)
• 2TB Kingston Fury Renegade SSD
• Windows 11 24H2 (Build 26100.3194)

Drivers used for the 7800 XT and 9070 were Adrenaline v24.30.31.03 / 25.3.1 RC (press driver provided by AMD), and for the 4070 Geforce v572.47 was used.

Benchmarks

For our benchmarks, hwinfo.com provided a commercial license of HWiNFO, and UL Solutions provided us with Professional (commercial use) licenses for 3DMark, VRMark, and Procyon.

We start our gaming performance testing using 3DMark synthetic benchmarks to give a rough idea of how the cards stack up against each other. In these results, we have also added the scores for the $1999+ GeForce RTX 5090 and the $250+ Intel Arc B580 since they are the highest-end and lowest-end GPUs of this current generation.

On 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra, which measures DirectX 11 performance at 4K, the 9070 XT is 36% and 76% faster than the 7800 XT and 4070 respectively.

On Time Spy Extreme, which is a DirectX 12-based 4K benchmark, the 9070 XT wins by even greater margins as it is 44.3% and 67.3% better than the 7800 XT and 4070, respectively.

Thus it looks like the new RDNA 4 card boasts DX12 specific optimizations and it also seems that Fire Strike even at 4K is perhaps CPU bottlenecked when it comes to the 9070 XT, despite us using a fairly powerful processor.

Up next we have Steel Nomad which is also based on DirectX 12 but is more intense than Time Spy Extreme as it aims to measure modern rasterization performance. Here the RX 9070 XT is 63% and 79% faster than 7800 XT and 4070, respectively.

In modern rasterization, it looks like AMD's 9070 XT has made strides, at least in the case of synthetic testing. We will see later if this holds for real-world gaming scenarios too.

So we then move on to ray tracing performance testing using 3Dmark's Speed Way. In this situation too, the new AMD RX 9070 XT shows a commendable performance uplift vs its previous generation as it does 57.3% and 41.2% better, respectively, than the 7800 XT and RTX 4070.

With that, we wrap up our synthetic testing and move on to real games. The RX 9070 XT is advertised as a 1440p and 4K GPU, therefore we chose 2560 x 1440 as our resolution for the tests given and also since this is a mid-range card that will appeal to a lot of 1440p gamers.

We start with 2016's Deus Ex Mankind Divided powered by the Dawn Engine. The Radeon 9070 XT starts off great as it demonstrates minimum frames that are higher than what the 7800 XT or 4070 are capable of delivering.

The Dawn Engine makes an appearance again later.

Following that, we have another 2016 title in the form of Final Fantasy XV based on Luminous Engine. Despite such a great start initially, the 9070 XT demonstrates a relatively poor show here as it is 'just' 27% and 17% faster than the 7800 XT and RTX 4070 respectively.

Up next, in 2018's Assassin's Creed Odyssey running on AnvilNext 2.0, the RX 9070 XT is only 18.5% faster than the 7800 XT. This is a DirectX 11 game and hence, as we saw on Fire Strike, the performance gap is lower.

Following two relatively consecutive poor shows from the new AMD GPU, we are once again back to an impressive performance demonstration in Shadow of the Tomb Raider based on the Foundation Engine.

In this game, the 9070 XT was 40% better than the 7800 XT and nearly 42% better than the 4070. Even the minimum FPS on AMD's Navi 48 GPU was significantly higher than those averages on the two lesser cards.

We tested our only Vulkan API title with 2019's World War Z that's based on the Swarm Engine. We saw a 27% better average framerate on the 9070 XT than on the 7800 XT. The lead extended to 35% vs the 4070.

We wanted to test ray-tracing performance too and 2020's Cyberpunk 2077 was our game of choice for that. We also enabled upscaling in this title. We stuck to FSR on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs since we wanted to make it an apples-to-apples comparison. (As a note, Team Red is bringing its new ML-based upscaling technology called FSR 4 to many games soon though it was not in the scope for today's testing.)

As you can see in the image above, AMD has made quite an extraordinary jump in performance in ray-traced Cyberpunk 2077 that runs on the Red engine. We are seeing a 95% improvement in the average framerate on the 9070 XT vs 7800 XT and a 97% boost in minimum FPS.

The company explained in detail during its presentation about the ray traversal and shading upgrades RDNA 4 brings. You can learn about it here in our dedicated piece.

AMD also touted its path tracing enhancements on RDNA 4, so we have taken a look at it too.

The improvement on RDNA 4 compared to RDNA 3 is evident again as we see a 79% gain on 9070 XT vs 7800 XT in averages and 86% better FPS for the minimums. More importantly, this is an actually playable output.

Note however, that the performance gap between the 4070 and 9070 XT has closed down compared to the earlier non-path traced scenario indicating that Nvidia is still superior for heavier ray traced rendering situations.

We also looked at another case of ray-traced game in the form of Bright Memory Infinite. This title is built on Unreal Engine 4 and does not feature as heavy a ray tracing as Cyberpunk, making it representative of lighter ray traced situations.

The RX 9070 XT does a great job here showcasing 51% and 40.5% more average frame output than RX 7800 XT and RTX 4070 respectively.

Released in 2021 and based on the Glacier 2 engine, Hitman 3 was 27.3% faster on the 7800 XT and a whopping 121% faster vs the 4070.

We find that in 2021's Far Cry 6, built on the Dunia Engine, the new 9070 XT is 27% and 28% faster than the 7800 XT in average and minimum framerates, respectively. The gap is about the same vs Nvidia's 4070.

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy was the only game in our rasterization test suite in which we see that the 9070 XT's performance was really poor in terms of minimum framerate. In all three of our runs, the card dipped quite a bit in FPS output, something we did not see with the other Dawn Engine game previously.

In The Callisto Protocol, we see one of the most unimpressive wins with just a 13% margin over 7800 XT, which is in contrast to what we observed in Bright Memory Infinite, which is also an Unreal Engine-based game.

Speaking of Unreal Engine (UE), Black Myth Wukong is up next and it is built on UE 5. The heavy cinematic setting even with FSR frame generation and 75 super-resolution is enough to overwhelm the RX 7800 XT. The new 9070 XT is far superior here putting up 58.5% better averages and even better 95% lows and minimum FPS.

Finally, we have Call of Duty Black Ops 6 as the last entry for our game testing. Built on IW 9.0 engine, this game runs exceptionally well on Radeon hardware and the 9070 XT is no different.

We get a 25% uplift in the average FPS vs the 7800 XT, and that extends up to 28% in 95% lows.

So far, overall, outside of a couple of instances, the new AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT has put up excellent numbers for gaming especially in ray tracing, though we still need to look at other aspects before moving to conclusions. As such, in the next section, we look at VRAM usage, performance-per-watt, and performance-per-dollar.

VRAM usage

We now highlight the VRAM usages of the three cards where the games used more than 4 GB of dedicated GPU memory. Keep in mind, these are the actual used VRAM amounts, not the allocated amounts.

To make sense of the data above, we also need to have a look at the percentage of VRAM used, since the 4070 is equipped with 12GB while the 9070 XT and 7800 XT both pack 16GB.

As you can see above, having 16 Gigs of memory really helps and it is evident in Cyberpunk 2077 where the GeForce GPU is seen consuming 75-80% VRAM.

We were also a bit disappointed to see that the 9070 XT ate up around the same amount of memory as the 7800 XT. While this is not a need for worry, we expected to see some improvement in this area since AMD promises better BVH compression with RDNA 4.

It could also be a case of incorrect reading as the 9070 XT is new and the software (HWiNFO) does not officially support it yet. We will update these figures later if we notice changes.

Power Efficiency

Next, we check out power efficiency measured using average FPS output per watt. The new AMD 9070 XT Sapphire Pulse model we reviewed consumed 304 watts or very close to that across all games. That is also the TBP (total board power) spec of the 9070 XT.

The RTX 4070 showed its efficiency with he lowest use at around 199-200 watts while the RX 7800 XT was anywhere between 270 watts to 290 watts and typically around 285 watts.

Despite the performance improvement on the 9070 XT, Nvidia's last-gen card still manages to trump the new Navi 48 in power efficiency in most situations. There was only a single instance where the 9070 XT was better than the 4070 which is in Hitman 3.

There is one big positive though. It appears that in newer titles, the 9070 XT is very close to or matches the efficiency of the RTX 4070, especially in situations which involve light to moderate ray tracing.

We also ran HwINFO64 and observed the following Hot Spot temps (Max) for each card:

• RTX 4070: 91 C
• RX 7800 XT: 92 C
• RX 9700 XT: 85 C (Max memory temp.: 92 C)

So it looks like the Sapphire Pulse model we received is doing a fantastic job at cooling this thing down, in spite of being in the very small Coolermaster NR200P Max. Let us also add here that the fan speed under load was hovering around 1700-2000 RPM, and it was not loud at all.

Value for Money

We finally come to the value-for-money category that we measure by average performance per dollar. For the comparison we take the launch MSRP values to gauge how well the value of the cards stack up against one another and how much better or worse the new GPU is compared to last gen.

Value-wise, the Radeon RX 9070 XT holds up incredibly well, as it is seen delivering the same and sometimes better value than the 7800 XT; and consecutively is much superior to Nvidia's 4070. There is only one case in the above chart where the 4070 manages to draw even with the 9070 XT, and that is in path traced-Cyberpunk 2077.

Conclusion

Okay, color us impressed because this is the first time in its RDNA generation that the Radeon division has managed to design a gaming architecture that is quite well-rounded overall. The improvement is especially noticeable in the case of ray tracing and path tracing but rasterization output is excellent too.

If power efficiency is not the most crucial selection criterion for you, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT should offer great value for those looking for a solid 1440p 144 Hz or a 4K 60 Hz gaming experience.

It can serve as a great upgrade from something like the RX 6700 XT, the RTX 3060, the 7700 XT, the 3070, and equivalents. Just keep in mind that you do need a relatively modern high end processor to pair it up with especially if you are looking to snag one up for 1440p144 gaming.

Unfortunately, we do not have Nvidia's $549 RTX 5070 or the $749 5070 Ti for testing, so we can't draw direct comparisons with it.

However, seeing how most of the GeForce 5000 series GPUs are overpriced and far above the set MSRP levels, it wouldn't be all that surprising to see the 5070 selling at prices similar to the 9070 XT, at least initially.

In that case, the Radeon GPU would most certainly be our pick due to what we saw in the VRAM consumption chart. We are fairly confident that some of the upcoming games would potentially overflow the available 12 GB VRAM buffer on the RTX 5070. And we don't even need any direct performance comparisons for that.

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