"Nvidia killer" finally? AMD official shares some details on RX 9070 XT performance

At its CES 2025 event this year, AMD shied away from unveiling details about its new Radeon RX 9070 XT GPUs based on RDNA 4. The company pre-briefed us and other media outlets on it though so we were already a bit familiar with what is coming.

AMD is changing the naming scheme for Radeon GPUs (again) as it is moving to the new Radeon RX 90_0 series from the previous RX 7_00 series and the company explained in its press deck why that is.

However, there were no concrete details on pricing and performance and hence we had to rely on leaks for that. IGN sneakily managed to benchmark the RX 9070 (non-XT) at a CES booth on Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and the card seemed to perform really well against RX 7900 XTX, 7800 XT, and 6950 XT.

Following that, alleged 3DMark DirectX 12 and Ray Tracing benchmarks also leaked for the 9070 XT and once more, RDNA 4 appears to be outputting very respectable performance. We compared the purported leaked scores vs Nvidia's RTX 4070, 4070 Ti and more, as well as AMD's 7700 XT, 7900 XTX, and more.

Obviously, leaks and rumors can never be trusted fully but they may just have become a lot more credible following an interview with AMD's Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions Frank Azor.

In the interview with PCWorld, Azor stated that the Radeon division is planning to reveal more details of its new card in just a few weeks. Hence, it looks like AMD would hold a separate launch event for RDNA 4 and also added that it wanted to see what Nvidia was up to with the new RTX 5000 series GPUs.

About the performance bit, Azor said:

What I'll tell you also is any performance that you've seen prior to CES has not been accurate, so those rumored performance leaks that are out there and things, those are not accurate. ...

 

You're going to get better performance than most of the leaks that I've seen, if not all of the leaks that I've seen. You'll get better performance actually out of the card, how much better?! I'm not going to tell you.

Again, Frank Azor reiterated AMD's strategy this time of building a mid-range focused product with RDNA 4 and that it is not going to be a "$1000 graphics card." It would also be stupid of AMD to do such a thing given that the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti respectively start at $549 and $749.

Azor also added some details about how the Radeon team is achieving this level of performance. Most of the developmental effort in RDNA 4 is around enhancing the AI compute throughput. Aside from that, ray tracing will also see some healthy improvement this time which is much welcomed from an AMD card given that Nvidia and even Intel are outdoing it. Rasterization performance though has taken a back seat:

You're gonna see a little bit of improvement in rasterization, as you would expect.You're going to see a lot of improvement in ray tracing, and you're going to see an enormous amount of improvement in AI compute capabilities.

AMD explained that AI was the most important bit this time due to its upcoming ML-based FSR 4 upscaler meant to compete directly against Nvidia DLSS and Intel XeSS.

Finally, the company assured that this time it is looking into criticism and feedback on last gen products (RX 7000 series) seriously as it is trying to get the price-to-performance right for its 9000 series GPUs. If you recall, while the 7900 XTX was praised by reviewers, its cut-down sibling, the 7900 XT failed to impress as much as it was priced too close to the XTX and thus offered worse value.

As AMD says, if the 9070 XT and 9070 are priced appropriately according to their performance and value, we could potentially finally see an actual "Nvidia killer" from the Radeon team, well not in terms of raw performance, but in terms of value.

If you are not familiar, there was a rumor back in 2019 that AMD was designing an "Nvidia Killer" that was meant to take down even GeForce's best. Sadly for Team Red and its fans, that never panned out.

Source: PCWorld (YouTube)

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